Please improve the Search function on many/all Church websites

LegacyUser

GJensen said: In the context of resolving a specific FamilySearch question, I made two suggestions. I was instructed to post them here instead. ... This suggestion relates to improving the Church's search functions:

Whether we're looking at Help in FamilySearch, or looking for something specific at ChurchofJesusChrist.org, the Search function on the Church's websites is just terrible. We can generally find things faster by using Google than the search function on our own websites!! That's just backwards! If the Church could dedicate some more resources to improving the Search capability across the board, it would be a huge help.

Thanks.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: FamilySearch and its routines are independent of other sites of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In many cases, searches are specifically tuned to the records they are searching.

In the case of FamilySearch, searching historical records uses the indexes that have been produced over the years by volunteers and there are errors in those indexes. FamilySearch is just now releasing the means to correct some parts of the indexes that have been published.

It will help a lot for you to be specific as to what records you are searching, the parameters you have entered, and the URL line that provides the search results. That way, the engineers can duplicate what you have entered and if needed, fine tune the search routines.

Keep in mind that computers are far from perfect and as such, a search needs to produce broad results that can be filtered down to produce the results you want. The more parameters that are initially applied, the greater the opportunity for no results than to start with a broad search and then filtering down using specific collections, locations, places, dates, and so on.

LegacyUser

GJensen said: Tom, I apologize for not being more clear in my initial comment/request. I have no problem with the tools and processes inside FamilySearch for searching historical records. I use that all the time, and realize the results are dependent on indexed and other data available in the system.

I was speaking more about generic searches in the Help area (as well as on the website ChurchofJesusChrist.org). As a FamilySearch example, I go to the FamilySearch Help Center and type into the search field “Policy on sealing children to foster parents.” These are the results that come back:

Articles
How do I seal a child to grandparents?
Policies for sealing deceased children to deceased parents

Lessons
Co Kraj To Obyczaj: Records of the Polish Partitions
Guide to reading parish records of Toulouse
Access to Records on FamilySearch
Introduction to Polish Research
Reading Polish Handwritten Records

There is a document we have from years ago titled “Policies for Preparing Names of Deceased Ancestors for Temple Work” that has very useful guidance. It looks like it was last updated in 2011. My search was to get the latest/current policy, or to at least confirm that this 2011 document was still valid. Instead I got helps for doing Polish research! This is what I meant in my initial post about the poor search function. Maybe Policy and Polish get combined simply because of their first four letters.

(To be fair, the article above on "Policies for sealing deceased children to deceased parents" has some high level guidance, but it's not as complete or helpful as the 2011 document. But maybe it IS the extent of current policy.)