why do I get 144K results from Find tool on Family Tree?
I asked for a person using the Find tool on Family Tree and I added info to narrow the results so why do I still get 144K results? It's as if Find doesn't work most of the time and I already tried marking and unmarking the "exact" button — even playing baseball I get 3 strikes even when I don't know in advance what kind of ball I'll get from the pitcher
Best Answers
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The following is speculation based on personal observation. The designers have never posted anything on these boards to explain how this all really works.
The FIND routine, like most modern search engines, is purposely fuzzy. In other words, it is designed to assume that the information you have could be wrong or the information in the database could be wrong and to provide as many results as possible, even when doing exact matching, in the hopes that in either case you will see in the results list the result you are looking for.
In particular, you will get a lot of matches if the person you are looking for in Family Tree does not exist there.
Here is a search for someone I know is not in Family Tree:
This gave me a lot of results which might be helpful if I am wrong about his birth place.
If I use exact searching for the place name I get this:
Fewer results. The first is an exact place name match at the county level and the second is an exact place name match at the country level.
If I take that second result and search for her instead so that I am searching for a profile that does exist while still keeping the exact place name turned on I get:
She is the first result, but then things get very fuzzy.
Making the first name be exact does narrow the results down to just one:
Others in the past have commented that the routine seems to be not a set of logical ANDs but instead is a set of logical ORs. That is, the routine is not searching for Fact1 AND Fact2 AND Fact3 but rather Fact1 OR Fact2 OR Fact3 and that exact searching turns this into Fact 1 OR ONLY Fact2 OR Fact3 with place names being an exact match if any of the components of the place name is an exact match.
Also, the routine is not a strictly "matching" process. It is a process which generates a likelihood score and the results list is a listing of those scores from best to worst. You can see the score by downloading the search results. (This option is found under the Preferences link)
For example, here are the results of my first search:
Apparently names get a lot of weight because having the first name and last name match while everything else is really wrong still gives a pretty good score.
The next search had the exact place name check box set and changed the results to this:
All the scores are worse because the place name matches are getting higher weight but the name matches are pretty bad. There is not a single George.
And my next to last search:
Because there is a profile that actually is Wilhelmine, the score is quite good for that match but quickly falls off.
If I then add mother's first name, father's first name, and spouse's first name I can drive her score quite high, but I also generate good scores for two of her siblings and they get pulled into the result's list:
I do not know what the highest score that can be generated is and I do not know what the lowest score which will still be included in the result's list is. Should whatever that lowest score is be raised in order to reduce the length of the list? Not sure if that would be helpful or harmful. That would be a design decision.
If you play around with your searches enough and get used to how the results get calculated you should be able to get the results you want with just a few trials. Where it seems most people get frustrated with searching is when they don't realized that they will never get good results with FIND, but will still almost always get results, if the person they are searching for does not have a profile in Family Tree.
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In my experience, there's no reason to worry about a large number of search results. If I have given a reasonable set of criteria (birth year and place, name, perhaps a parent), then I can be confident that if there is a match, it will appear in the first 10-20 results. The results are prioritized by closest match. So it doesn't matter whether there are a total of 20 or 20,000 — I'm never going to look past the first 20 or so anyway. So I'd advise you not to worry about how many results are returned — just focus on the first few and ignore the rest.
Since the Find feature is designed to find a particular person in Family Tree, if the person you are looking for is not in Family Tree, the results won't be helpful. Instead, it's generally most helpful to find some sort of relative of that person who is in Family Tree. If their parents or spouse or child are in the Tree, then you can start there and begin looking for records (sources) that will document those close relatives, and hopefully you'll eventually find a record that connects that existing person to the person you're looking for.
You're right that adding living people won't help any other researchers at this point. It could help you by providing a profile that you can attach sources to (especially source records that connect the person to their deceased close family members who are already in the Tree). Then if those living people die before you do, then you can mark them as deceased and all the work you've done on their profiles will become public and will be useful. But it's a bit of a gamble on using your time that way — if they outlive you, then your work on those profiles will mostly be wasted, since no other users can see those living profiles. However, I do this on occasion, because having those living profiles within a family can be helpful in finding additional information about deceased members of the family.
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Answers
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Perhaps you could provide an example of where you are encountering this issue. The FIND tool never worked as well in finding "exact" matches as when searching for historical records at https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/ but I believe it is now much better in narrowing down results.
In the example below, practically all of the 219 Tree Search Results that were returned did meet expectations, the few that didn't having dates of birth (or christening) just a few years out of the range I'd inputted.
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As @Paul W suggested, it would help if you could share an example. To do this, perform the search so that you are looking at the search results. Then go to the address bar of your browser, and copy the entire URL to your clipboard. Then paste it in a reply on this thread.
You said that you "added info to narrow the results." Often when you add search criteria you don't actually narrow the search at all. For example, if I search for John Smith, I'll get about 7.5M results. If I add a birth place of England, I still get 7.5M results, but those in England now come first in the results list. Only if I do an exact search for the birthplace of England will the results get reduced (to about 1.5M).
Note that simply enabling the "Show Exact Search" switch (circled below in red) makes no difference in the search results. Only when you do that and you check at least one "exact" checkbox (such as the one circled below in green) will your search results actually be constrained.
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Thank you everyone. I do know how to use both Exact Search buttons. I was NOT looking for an EXact Match - only a reasonable number to review further— 15, 20 even 100 names is a reasonable number, 1000 is not. Further, I did not understand that what really happens with Find is that if a person is NOT on Family Tree, then Find will simply rearrange the same thousands of results but it won't give you any clues as to which other types of records to search before it gives up and can't find anything. In my situation, I am specifically looking for NON-relatives which might likely be still alive. I checked the 1950 census to find JL's deceased parents and an older sibling. I knew there were only 2 children. So I will add JL and her older sib as living? How does this help other researchers in the future?
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RE: "but it [FIND] won't give you any clues as to which other types of records to search before it gives up and can't find anything."
No, FIND will never suggest other records because it only searches Family Tree. Only SEARCH suggests records.
RE: "I am specifically looking for NON-relatives which might likely be still alive."
The you are using the wrong tool if you use FIND because Family Tree will never display living profiles unless you have personally entered those profile or belong to a family group that contains them.
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@Alan E. Brown @Gordon Collett Thank you, because of your encouragement & help I've found this family using Historical records (1950 census) - and I'll move forward with more confidence. 😎
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