Sorting search results

LegacyUser

dbhoskisson said: Please allow us to sort search results by the criteria we are searching on. Or let us prioritize the search criteria. If place is more important than name, right now I have to sift through several pages of garbage to find records that match what I ask for.

Right now, if I give a name and a place I get all sorts of versions of the name from places that are entirely irrelevant. If I could say that place namr is more important, it can show me all the search results for a particular place, before it shows other spellings of a last name for example.

This can't be that hard to do. You must be scoring each search criteria. Yet people have been begging for thos for at least 7 years.

LegacyUser

Paul said: I have not found another website that offers any better than FamilySearch.

You can search on exact name, use wildcards and apply filters to narrow the search results. Even dates are prioritised, even if unrequested ones can't always be completely filtered out.

Unless you can give an example of a website that provides the exact criteria you are requesting I would assume what you are requesting must be "hard to do". I would be the first to criticise if I thought FamilySearch could be doing much better, but my experience in using Ancestry and Find My Past indicates it does relatively well in this respect.

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: The website has at this point chosen to have the prioritizing of search results be taken care of by using all the filters they have provided.

If you have a specific place that you only want to see records from, then use the place filters found on the left hand side of the search results.

Here are the filters for birth place:



After an initial filter is chosen, often a second or ever more layers of filters can be applied:





There are also filters for date ranges that drill down to the decade:





Also, a lot of people also overlook that you can narrow your initial search results by specific collections of records using the Collections tab at the top of the results list:



Using these powerful tools, you can manipulate your initial search in all sorts of ways without re-entering the search criteria just by adding and removing filters.

LegacyUser

Lundgren said: Thank you for your feedback.

We are aware that this is a feature that people would like to have, and are aware that there are some exhaustive record searches that people would like to perform that are more difficult because they cannot do this.

That being set, there are some fundamental issues that make this sorting a scored subset of results difficult in a system that has billions of records.

The search results are ordered today, but much like many search systems they are ordered by the documents that most closely match the criteria you supply. If you are curios about the score of the actual results, you can see that in the downloadable result sets.

If there are results that have an equal score, then the results you see will appear to be in a random order, as the system has scored equally, they appear as equal values to the system.

Hopefully, the suggestions others have offered will help you filter your results down to a more manageable result set.

I'm sorry I can't offer you your desired feature.

Thank you!