[or-roots] search engines

[Leslie Chapman]

There are a lot of annoying search engines out there, but I have to say I
feel Ancestry.com goes out of their way to make theirs annoying, when
searching the freebie section I used to go through the tedious process of
putting in time frame and places of birth and all the rest of the details on
their search page and would so aggravated when I was looking for somebody
born in the last half of the 19th century and would get 3/4 of my hits being
folks born before 1600. At first I assumed that the problem was that
"somewhere" in the particular file was a reference to date in the time frame
I wanted, and the search engine just wasn't smart enough to figure out that
since I had asked for both facts that I expected a relationship between
them. I finally discovered however that the search engine just ignores
everything you put in except the names, and if I remember correctly isn't
fanatic about the relation between first and last name. So now if I want to
search ancestry family files all I bother to plug in are the names. I
usually search by given name and surname and if I know it, to narrow it down
I search for spouse too, the search engine still brings up all the names,
but it gives "some" priority to hits with correct spouse. I say some because
the last time I did such a search the hits with the correct spouse were on
the second page.

I have never fully understood how the hits are ranked, it seems to me that
the hit with the most information about the person you are looking for
should come up first, but it seems to me that the better hits are always
part way down the list??

The one I think ancestry does better than Heritage Quest is recoginizing the
distinction between given name and surname, in HQ unless there is some way
to specify complete character string and I have never been sure that "given
name, surname" works that way though it seems to, you are stuck with getting
every hit that brings up either name, whether it is given or surname, which
gets a little frustrating when I am searching for some of my Melvins since
there are a lot of people out there with that for a first name, I have even
found a couple of women with that for a first name, I kinda wondered if that
was for real?

Les C


-----Original Message-----
From:  CKlooster at aol.com
Sent: Wednesday, July 19, 2006 10:44 PM

Pat...what I meant by "buggy" was that if you do a search for a specific
name such as "Augusta Bullard" in the periodical section of Ancestry, you
may get a hit and bring up the edition in question and find a story that
reads "...last August a bull was stolen from the xyz stockyard".   There are
search engines with OCR programs that are more discriminating than
Ancestry's is.  Those of us who use the full Ancestry service are aware of
this little twist, but it's still often a disappointment when you find
several promising hits in the right time frame only to find that the search
engine spotted portions of words in proximity and reached an erroneous
conclusion!  This is true whether you are doing a ranked search or a search
for a specific name...by the way, I did do specific name searches with
various of the given Bullard names before I resorted to a broader search.

But you are right...sometimes the stories are interesting even if it isn't
the person being sought.  I got a kick out of the story about the good
reverend...brings a whole new meaning to the term "Bible thumping".  And to
think that a fraternal order of Druids were cavorting on the banks of the
Willamette in the 1880's...  Apparently there is nothing new about the "New
Age"!

Carla