The Search function does not find readily available records
Hello,
I hate to complain about a wonderful free website like Family Search, but something is broken in the Search function. I've been researching mostly in the UK records for the past year, and I couldn't make any progress if I didn't have access to Ancestry, particularly, and also Find My Past. When I start a search on a new name, typically a search on FS will bring up one or two useful results, and the next 8-10 (if in fact 8-10 more are found) are totally useless. When I run the same search on Ancestry, I typically get 8-10 useful hits. I often copy the information from Ancestry onto FS, and that may bring up a couple more hits, so it's clear the information was already in the FS database, but the search engine wasn't finding it. I know Ancestry has databases FS doesn't have, but still, FS doesn't find the info it does have. Also, the options to focus the search are not very helpful. If I want to look only at one country's records, for example, I don't see a way to do that. I wonder if you benchmark your search function against Ancestry's. I find both their Edit Search function and their results much more powerful than FS. I'm sorry for those who don't have a free Ancestry membership, as the results coming from FS are wholly inadequate to do even mid-level tree building.
Answers
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@HRTomlinson Hola como esta? Se que buscar a veces se torna difícil. Le envió un link con sugerencias de como acceder a mas detalles cambiado la forma de buscar:
Puede ingresar a la categoría sugerir ideas y comentar lo que le es útil a usted para ayudarnos entre todos con este gran trabajo de encontrar nuestras raíces. Envió también el link par buscar en un mapa tal vez le sirvan las instrucciones:
Agradecemos sus comentarios e ideas.
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Familysearch recently changed the search function. It can be nearly impossible to find a set of search criteria that will find records that are known to exist.
The non-exact filtering seems to be set very strict now such that if you do not enter every field exactly as is indexed, the records cannot be found.
It is very frustrating.
This link shows some search terms that should work, but don't, when looking for a census record.
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I think their search functions are not working at all. No matter which film I try to access, I click on the magnifying glass and get an "oops, something went wrong". This has gone on for days.
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The problem of clicking on the magnifying glass and geting an "Something went wrong" has beeen reported to the engineers and they are working on it.
We hope you are able to continue your work by using other areas of FamilySearch.
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I have also noticed that the search function is sometimes failing to find existing records. There have been recent updates to the place names and I wonder if that is involved. I have only encountered this probelm (so far) on one short named location, Mače, in Krapina Zagorje district of Croatia.
If I only enter Mače in the birth place name it finds nothing. But if I enter "Mače, Krapina-Zagorje" it does find them.
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