The wrap-up, with links to the earlier installments, is here:
http://blog.familytreemagazine.com/insi ... rycom.aspx
Her writeup of their presentation on the search engine is here:
http://blog.familytreemagazine.com/insi ... cated.aspx
The thing I'd like to see is 'search within results' and be able to ask the search engine 'show all records matching ' to reveal all the results agreeing with one single criterion, or sorting the results on each criterion.[Search Project Manager Anne]Frustratingly, sometimes records you know aren't your ancestor get more points than the ones that might be him. You could spend hours sifting through all the search resultsit's hard to know when to stop (someone said after two or three pages of results, it's unlikely you'll find the record you're looking for).
Mitchell said that the search engine's algorithm will soon be adjusted to subtract points when a name or date in a record doesnt match what you typed in. Before, this additional step in the search process wouldve taken too long and made the servers start smoking. But now that the engineers have almost figured it out, your search results should appear in a more logical order, with the best matches higher up on the list.
Its entirely possible my ancestors passenger list has been destroyed and they hid from the 1920 census enumerators, but once the changes go live, Im going to repeat these frustrating searches.
Names are weighted more heavily than place of origin, for example. If we could sort on place of origin, this might bring several family members with the same surname together in the search results.
One can fake that by cutting and pasting search results and re-sorting them in Excel, but it's tiresome to do so (and not practical when the results are in the thousands).
Jan
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