Seach no longer honors search request terms

LegacyUser

dbhoskisson said: How am I supposed to search on a specific birth year range now?

When I say 1847 to 1850, I get search results that include people born in the 1900's and beyond.

It is already hard enough to sort through the strange name matches, now I can't even search by birth year?

LegacyUser

Paul said: It is very disappointing we can no longer make "exact match" searches that mean literally that. I find FamilySearch's approach of prioritising results to be in line with those used at Find My Past and Ancestry, but that is not mean the change is an improvement.

Not only dates, but exact names could be searched on previously. This itself had been an enhanced feature a few years back, but now the position has reverted to the original one. For example, if I know my relative was always known as plain "William", I do not want results that include "John William" and "William Charles" records. The ability to search on the one name only was announced as an enhancement by manager Robert Kehrer several years back, now this ability has been lost again.

I believe FamilySearch developers wanted to put the search criteria in line with FIND in Family Tree, where I believe it has never been possible to make searches producing only truly exact-match results. I hate searching in Ancestry for similar reasons. These changes have certainly made searches far more difficult.

LegacyUser

Paul said: Here's an example of what probably you (like me) would prefer not be be presented with. I only want to see the top result, as that is what I have specified.



However, a FamilySearch employee has replied to a similar issue in another thread, and it doesn't seem there is any chance of FS reverting to the way things were (for about 3 or 4 years).

LegacyUser

Lundgren said: Thank you for your comments.

The check box that is next to places and names does not apply to the years. This is a source of confusion for many. However, it only applies to the names and places. This as been the case for the last 10 years. Further back than that exceeds my experience with the system.

If you would like to filter results, please look in the lower left corner of your browser. There you will find filters that may help you with your research. Please note that they are limited to decade ranges.

There has been a bug in the system for a few days now that we are working on resolving that has caused some of the year range boosting not to function correctly. We hope to have that restored to the previous behavior shortly.

If you can share links to your searches, we can look at them directly. (That is a great way to give us examples of what we are seeing so we can examine them directly.)

LegacyUser

Paul said: Thanks for your responses, both here and on the other thread (to which I have added further comments).

Here is an example: https://www.familysearch.org/search/r...

As suggested, I would be grateful if you could elaborate on the "range boosting" function. Sorry to sound pedantic, but "range elimination" is what most of us are really concerned about. Although I guess once the current problem is resolved, we will soon see how far the number of results will have been cut AND be able to work out the rough +/- factor that is usually applied to prevent, say, the current 56,502 results I am receiving with my example (William Wright 1800 births).

LegacyUser

dbhoskisson said: I agree with Paul. We have the ability to enter a range in the search and that should be our preferred way of doing things. I am aware of bad record keeping and bad interpretations of the images, but I will always expand the range myself if I am not finding what I am looking for.

If you want to do "range boosting", you should also provide "Exact match" checkboxes for the years so that we can force searching only within range.

When I am dealing with a last name like Wilson or Smith, for example, I already have more records than I know what to do with. I need the ability to reduce my ranges or it would take weeks to find what I am looking for.

Thanks for letting me rant.

LegacyUser

Lundgren said: I also would really like an advanced UI that lets us drive the search to do exactly what we tell it to do.

The fear however is that the UI already has lots of places to put information in. If we multiply the fields in the 10x to give full access to all the knobs by default it will overwhelm users. See google's advanced search https://www.google.com/advanced_search Most users don't use it, but the ones that do appreciate it.

We may be able to create an advanced interface as an alternate to a simple (simpler?) default interface. But, that is down the road a ways yet. (And I don't work on the user interface...)

For now, we believe the date bug is resolved and either the new or the old interface should return the same results. (The same date results we have known and [loved|hated] for the last 10 years).

Thanks again for the feedback!