full place names carried into searches, additional info

LegacyUser

Donald Allen Soper said: In the search screen we are allowed to easily remove a piece of information by clicking on the ‘x’ by the field, perhaps if you loaded up the screen with all the information you have on the person i.e full birth and death place, marriage info and parents name. We would have everything we know about the person.
We than could eliminate typing and do everything by clicking on the ‘x’ to remove a piece of info or click on the field to restore it.

LegacyUser

Lundgren said: Thank you for your suggestion here, as well as the previous post.

When searching for records, you generally get the best results by:

- picking the record, or type of record you are interested in locating.
- checking to see if we have that record collection. (No point in searching or an 1890 census record...)
- determining the information that would be on that record. (Putting a spouse name or death date when looking for a birth record will only return the wrong records)
- when supplying places and dates, start wide and then narrow them down to target the place/time you are interested in. (Put full place names in place fields. Don't use just "Santa Clara." You might know you mean Santa Clara Utah, but we might have thought you meant Santa Clara, Spain. Do that even if you have filtered into the state of Utah, because we may still interpret the single place of Santa Clara as Spain and can look for people born in Spain in a Utah filtered data set.)
- use exact sparingly, if at all, only to narrow things down, or when you have found the record else where and know exactly what is on the index of the record you are trying to find. (Exact does not apply to dates. Exact on names does not behave the same as it does on places, it is not a simple thing....)
- use the filters in the lower left hand section of the site to select collections, places, date ranges. (Search values you type in are not filters.)

Several years ago work was done to determine what values should be used and the detail level that should be supplied for places and dates to retrieve a reasonable starting search. Those values are used on the website. Other familysearch tools (mobile) ideally would be using the same values.

We are in the early phases of discussing how we can improve the results where information can be take from a person in the tree to preform an initial search. The ideas will take a time, experimentation and development before they can become a reality on the site.

While your idea is possible, it was previously determined to not be way we wanted to go to help as many users of the site as possible.

LegacyUser

Donald Allen Soper said: When I do a search I want to see anything that might be available. If I only have a name, I would expect to see the records that have that name, not be mixed with a bunch of other names.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Donald, that expectation will be wrong in many situations. E.g., what if the name on many index entries were indexed wrong or the handwriting was interpreted wrong? Here is a comment I just added to another topic you started:

...all of this digital searching is using indexed data. There are reams of mistakes in index files, so it seems that in order to make sure you've gotten as many of the actual records (i.e., the ones that may actually apply to the name you are searching for), you would need a "looser", or "less precise" search to return a set of records for your starting point.

If all index data had been copied correctly from the originals, and all of the originals were recorded exactly and accurately as they should have been, then a "precise" search such as the one you are talking about would be fine. But we are searching in a database of indexes and originals that are FAR from accurate in many cases.

So it just seems that a highly accurate and precise search would be counter-productive in this environment. I suspect that some kind of custom balance between accuracy and "Loose" matches is needed. I can only assume that that is why we are encouraged to use a loose set of search data, and then refine that search with the filters.

Finding that balance is obviously an art form that I haven't mastered, especially with the search algorithms changing frequently and being tweaked all the time.

LegacyUser

David Newton said: As others have said what about transcription errors? Exact searches can be very useful, but they are not the be all and end all.