Mark looked-at records to prevent re-looking at them in a later search

LegacyUser

Rohan Schwartz said: Have some way to mark searched records (indexed and unindexed) that you have looked at it before - this should be saved to your profile obviously. I every so often do a re-search on a surname to see if new records have been indexed, and then I don't know which ones I have looked at before or not, and waste a lot of time opening the records only to realize they look familiar and I have looked at them before.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: First, welcome to the community-powered feedback forum for FamilySearch. FamilySearch personnel read every discussion thread and may or may not respond as their time permits. We all share an active interest in using the resources of this site and as users, we have various levels of knowledge and experience and do our best to help each other with concerns, issues, and/or questions.

Unindexed records are not searched. Searching only works on the index, not the record itself.

That is immaterial, though. There is a problem with this idea -- and that is when to see the search results and when not to see the search results.

For instance, if I search for a given person, and mark those records that I have looked at, the search results will no longer show those results.

It is entirely possible that I inadvertently mark a record as "looked at" for the person and then, upon obtaining addition information, I realize I need to look at the records that I marked as "looked at".

Then there is the realization that I did not have the correct name, and need to perform the same search with a different given name (this often occurs when a name like "Joseph" is never used by the person, but he went by a nickname, such as "Bud".

There would need to be a way to "clear" all previous "looked at flags."

When thousands of users and millions of records, even the idea of maintaining specific search information (a search "history") will be a daunting task for the program, but from a user point of view, it looks to be something that would be handled as a check box filter -- check to look at all records, not just those not marked as "looked at".

But behind the scenes, this may be something that is not practical from a site "loading" perspective. Sooner or later, there will be many millions of records that could be returned in a search. FamilySearch is continuing to add indexes to many existing collections. It is only a matter of time when the numbers impact just the search, much less a filter to not see those "looked at" by the user.

But the developer teams come up with some amazing solutions, so don't consider my thoughts to be final on the possibility.