Hope you had a great 4th of July!
Just when we think we've reached capacity on the new stuff, more drama! Switch channels and look at Ancestry this week. Not surprisingly they are also doing some shifting and changing and updating. It does look remarkably like the Family Search search page. Hmmm. I think there is a good healthy competition between all the sites. It moves us faster on the path to make things better for us all.
Not surprisingly, if you go to this site below (The Ancestry Insider) you see that at the time of this writing there is only one comment...complaining! My thought is...how ordinary. We are all so resistant to change. On the other hand, they like the feedback and who knows maybe your comment can make a difference. This is healthy if it is done respectfully.
It is good that they are updating and changing their search functionality. I think most search engines leave something to be desired in searching for records or I just don't know what I am doing that well yet. I do know how to filter, etc. But sometimes they throw me some real curve balls. One thing I did learn at first reading was skip the basic search and go to the advanced search and click on exact if you know the exact information and save yourself the heartache of many, many, many seemingly unrelated hits.
My point is, the more they are all talking about it the more we can learn. So I am all ears or eyes as the case may be.
By the way, this is a really fun blogger. He is incognito, not giving too much information about himself and he is always wearing a hat and avoiding the camera at conferences. He may have been employed by one or both of the big guys at some time or other but his shtick is anonymity to spice things up. Also he treats each of the entities equally and in an unbiased way which is refreshing. Here is what he had to teach today.
Friday, July 5, 2013
Old Search Experience in New Search Clothing
"On 27 July 2013, Ancestry.com
announced the retirement of its “Old Search” search engine. “We expect
to discontinue the old search function as a separate experience within
the next 6 months,” wrote Ancestry.com. This has been “S.O.S. Week” at the Ancestry Insider Offices where Wednesday we examined the Real Old Search pages. Contrast them with today’s.
Before logging in, the home page today does not provide a search form. After logging in, it looks like this:
Contrasting it with Real Old Search, note that it allows specification of a full place name, specification of an estimated birth year, and a checkbox to limit results to US collections. These are the best fields for a new search, ranked result mindset. Matches are not limited to exact, so the number of results is huge and some do not match the search terms entered.
If you are an Old Search fan, do yourself a favor and go directly to exact searching: click Search, Show Advanced, and Match all terms exactly:
To change last name from exact to Soundex, click underneath the Last Name on “Restrict to exact.”
To enter a birth and death country and year, click on Add life events. It is not really possible to enter the span used by Real Old Search. Instead, set the Any Event year to something in the middle and change the +/- box to 1, 2, 5, or 10.
Enter relatives under Family Member, clicking on Add Family Members as necessary.
To force the search results to show categories and top databases, select Categories above the results on the right:
Clicking on a single database shows a sorted list of matches. Unfortunately, sort orders are not always intelligent. For the 1930 census, results are sorted by age, not location. This splits and shuffles families with other families across. Also, the full width of the window is underutilized. Many census columns could have been displayed. The results are no worse than current Old Search, but screen size has increased over the last 10 years. On my 15 inch monitor, just 5 inches are used to display results.
Bottom line:
Before logging in, the home page today does not provide a search form. After logging in, it looks like this:
Contrasting it with Real Old Search, note that it allows specification of a full place name, specification of an estimated birth year, and a checkbox to limit results to US collections. These are the best fields for a new search, ranked result mindset. Matches are not limited to exact, so the number of results is huge and some do not match the search terms entered.
If you are an Old Search fan, do yourself a favor and go directly to exact searching: click Search, Show Advanced, and Match all terms exactly:
To change last name from exact to Soundex, click underneath the Last Name on “Restrict to exact.”
To enter a birth and death country and year, click on Add life events. It is not really possible to enter the span used by Real Old Search. Instead, set the Any Event year to something in the middle and change the +/- box to 1, 2, 5, or 10.
Enter relatives under Family Member, clicking on Add Family Members as necessary.
To force the search results to show categories and top databases, select Categories above the results on the right:
Clicking on a single database shows a sorted list of matches. Unfortunately, sort orders are not always intelligent. For the 1930 census, results are sorted by age, not location. This splits and shuffles families with other families across. Also, the full width of the window is underutilized. Many census columns could have been displayed. The results are no worse than current Old Search, but screen size has increased over the last 10 years. On my 15 inch monitor, just 5 inches are used to display results.
Bottom line:
- Skip the home page
- Use exact match
- Use Add Life Events to enter birth and death search terms
- Change the result list from Records mode to Categories mode
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