Something wrong with Search

LegacyUser

Heidi Kuosmanen said: I searched Amalia Christiansdotter from Finland and results in the first page, 14 of 25 were from Sweden, Norway and Denmark!
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/fin...

With FamilySearch Tree App when I was searching same person, Find Records: FamilySearch, I got 18 results and none of them were from Finland. Only three of those persons were marked as born in Finland all of those three were male! And I am searching female!

LegacyUser

Lundgren said: Each of the values used in the search trigger results to come back.

Additionally each value has a certain impact on the search results ordering.

Each name/date/place/sex that is found in a tree person causes that person to be selected as a search result.

Each name/date/place/sex is given a score for quality of the match of that value to the tree. The scores of each matching piece are added together for each tree person that is found. The persons are then returned in the order of the highest score down to the lowest.

There is not filtering possible on the current Tree search UI.

This means that you can get results for countries other than the one you selected, as well as sexes other than the one you specify. Those will impact the order of the results.

It is generally a good idea to start with a little data, and then add more as you go to improve your results. As the Tree search currently UI does not expose any filtering, there is no way to get results of a single sex, or location, or date.

LegacyUser

Juli said: Lundgren, do you have any input on the search algorithms? The recent tweaks have emphatically NOT been an improvement. It feels like my inputs are being completely ignored -- like, not even "we'll take that under advisement", but more like "yeah, whatever, here's some totally-wrong results for you".

LegacyUser

Lundgren said: I do have input on how the search back end works.

Recently, the chargers that have been done are all related to places. I'm sorry you've felt neglected. We have used your input as well as others to track down several place related problems.

Some of the fixes will require a complete reload if the billions of records in the system before you will see them. We do complete reloads a few times a year. We are planning on doing one of these reloads in the first quarter this year.

Once that is complete we will verify that the place searching has improved.

The behavior I described above has not been changed.

Thank you again for your input. Some issues are more difficult to resolve and take more time than others, thank you for being patient.

LegacyUser

Justin Masters said: It's been like this for awhile, an most people have learned to start using the "Collections" tab after they do a search, to more specifically filter down to desired results.

LegacyUser

Paul said: Lundgren

You say: "It is generally a good idea to start with a little data, and then add more as you go to improve your results." I know I have raised this issue before, but this certainly no longer applies when doing an exact-match search for a person in a particular town or city. I still find it difficult to adapt to the fact I know have to add a county (Durham) when searching for my relatives who lived in Sunderland. For many years a "Sunderland" input worked just fine, now I get "No results" (except in a couple of certain particular instances) if I forget to add "Durham". Quite baffling when this unannounced change was first introduced.

LegacyUser

Lundgren said: I can't say that I'm familiar with either of those places.

If you have already shared this information in a dedicated post, then we have looked at it and it will probably be fixed in the next reload if possible. If not, then it may be dealt with via changes to the UI that are in development.
If you have not created a new dedicated post with search links, please do and we will look into it.

Many places in the world have the same name. The system tries to figure out which place you are after. If you take the guess work out of it then you may find what you are after more easily.

It may help you with places if you start at the country level and then narrow your way down adding jurisdiction levels to narrow your results. Adding the country for your county may help.

We did make a significant change with regard to places. Familysearch choose not to announce it. I don't have control of that. We have mentioned it in other posts here.

In addition to the back end work, there are changes under evaluation and development to the user interface to try to improve user experience as well.

LegacyUser

Juli said: Yeah, there's definitely something wrong with Search. The math doesn't work.

https://www.familysearch.org/search/r...
Searching for first name: Geza
Birthplace: Dobšiná, Rožňava, Slovakia
filter: birth year 1800 (to get rid of results where Geza is not the one being born)

438 results; out of the first 100 of those, 7 have surnames starting with S.

https://www.familysearch.org/search/r...
Searching for first name: Geza, last name: S*
Birthplace: Dobšiná, Rožňava, Slovakia
filter: birth year 1800

429 results.

?!??

Even if I assume that all of the rest of the no-surname-specified results have surnames beginning with S, that's only 345 entries that supposedly match the narrower search criteria. (The actual number is likely much closer to 30, if the rest of the results have the same rate of S- surnames as the first page.) Where are the other 84 (or likely more like 399) results coming from? Or alternately, why aren't all of the 429 matches to the narrower criteria showing up for the broader search?

LegacyUser

Heidi Kuosmanen said: In here the biggest problem is that all nordic countries used to use patronymic system and almost all names were same. Thus using name as the major impactor for the search results will cause problems. Even using place in the search, it will not give very accurate search results. And in my example there was no high scores given to country. We really need the possibility to choose if we want to search by date!

And yes I do know what good possibilities this system can offer. Once I found my distant relatives who moved to Viipuri, Finland (all church records were distroyed in WW2 for long time period) so I thought I can never found their decendants, but with FamilySearch Record Search I found that they had moved to St. Petersburg, Russia from Viipuri and from there to USA. (In this case my relatives used a real family name)

Then a bad example. I found that someone had added a marriage to one of my relative living in Finland and the husband being from Sweden. None of the Finnish records say that she would have married a Swedish man. In Swedish marriage record time could have been right, names were almost right but then from other Swedish records I found that that Swedish man married Swedish woman, and not my Finnish relative. (In this case all persons related used patronymics)

LegacyUser

Lundgren said: Thanks for the concrete example we will will at it! The only thing better would be a new post with this example.

I expect what you are seeing is this The search is optimized for surnames. There are many computers used to store the searchable data. When a surname is provided the system only searches the parts of the system that contain the specified surname. This allows us to use far fewer machines to do the same number of searches.

I believe what is happening here is the system is only searching portions of the data that contain surnames beginning with s*. Results that match that are given a score and returned. Names that contain Geza and S* are given a higher score than those without and are returned sooner than those with just S*.

If this is correct, you will no longer see Geza records that are not stored on the same machines as the S* records.

When you search for Geza with no surname, the entire system is searched. (No optimization.) All of the records in the entire system are scored and returned.

We will make sure this is the case. If this is what is happening then today, this is by design.

LegacyUser

Lundgren said: I too have patronymic (Swedish) records that I search for and would like to be able to exactly search for a year/month/day. It is on the list of things to do that gets prioritized against other things.

Many records do not have that level of detail however, and this does just help some of us.

LegacyUser

Kenny Parkinson Кенни Паркинсон said: Juli,
We were able to look into this exact use case. It does appear that the numbers are off, here is why. Searches without a surname are very taxing on the search engine because we optimize searches by surname. We currently limit searches that don’t have a surname by restricting how many variants of the other terms (given name, place, ect.) are looked for.
We understand this is not ideal for many and are looking for different ways to optimize the searches so this limitation will not be required. Thank you for your patience.