Searching Names
When I search up names on FamilySearch with specific birth/death dates, along with the place, it comes up with people that were born/died on different years, and sometimes it shows a different place than the one I originally searched for. I think that FamilySearch should make it so it doesn't just search for the person by their name, but for the year(s) and the place(s) also, to make it more specific and easier to find the person you're looking for.
Answers
-
Like most people (including me, most of the time), you expect the various search fields to be connected with a logical "and": you want results for that birthplace and that birth year.
Unfortunately, the current algorithm connects them with a logical "or": it gives results for that birthplace but a different birth year, as well as for that birth year but a different birthplace. If there are any records that match both search fields, those should come before the results that only match one, but this may be overridden by the different weightings of the types of search fields: people's names are generally given more weight than dates and places. This means that a record that's a good match to the name fields generally comes before those that match a date and place but are only a partial match to the name.
Unlike the search fields, the search filters do use a logical "and": if you tell it to filter the list to births in Continental Europe in the 1880s, then everyone on your results list should have both a birthplace in Continental Europe and a birthdate in the 1880s. The one caveat is, you can't input those two filters at once. If you click the "Birth" filter (gray bubble at the top of the results list), choose Continental Europe, and then switch to the "Birth Year (Range)" tab without clicking "Apply", then you'll end up with a date filter applied, but not a birthplace one. (Yes, I have done this, more than once.) You have to apply one filter, then click the bubble again to apply the other filter in that category.
2 -
Thank you! This really helps.
0 -
The FamilySearch search tools (Search for records, Find for the tree) are very loose about dates, and checking the Exact box does not change this behavior. I sure wish there was an info button explaining how it works.
1 -
As you analyze search results lists, you will find that generally when the dates start landing out of the range you specified, there are no more good results to your search. Like most search engines these days, the search routine does try to give you as many possibly helpful results as possible. This is why you almost always get hundreds of results for a search although only a small handful of results are even reasonable.
1 -
I'm always surprised when the search returns anything that I am looking for.
0
