• Record Previews
• Image Snapshots
• Refined Searches
• Type-ahead Tools
• Global Searches
• Advanced Searches
• Filters
• Keyword Searches

Anyone can register to attend the webinar by visiting the New Search Webinar Registration

The webinar is open to everyone; you do not have to be a member of Ancestry.com to register for or attend the webinar.

Allow me to clear up a misconception that the new home page on Ancestry.com and the new search interface are related—they are not.  When we launched the new home page, there was a bug that inadvertently took many of the new home page visitors into the new search experience at the same time.  We’re sorry about that—the bug has subsequently been fixed.  So, if you find yourself in the new search experience and would like to switch back to the old search experience, you can do that on any of the search pages, just not from the home page itself.  I hope that helps. 

Let me summarize some of the key issues that people have brought up so I can respond to each one in turn:

1. The exact settings don’t seem to work the same way between the new and old search experiences

Thanks for the feedback on this issue.  Specific examples have helped us identify a significant bug in the system that was indeed preventing the exact matches from returning appropriately in the new search.  We’ve fixed that bug and things should be much, much better now.  If you’re still seeing cases where you’ve marked exact on the search or on a specific field and it looks like it is being ignored somehow, please let us know.  We want to make sure we get these issues resolved as soon as possible.

2. The “fuzzy” search returns too many results

We’re working on making the search engine stricter about what results it returns, even on “fuzzy” searches—this should dramatically reduce the number of matches that are returned.  Additionally, you can always turn on the “Advanced” features on the new search and simply mark any field as “Exact” to ensure that results matching only the appropriate information are displayed.  You can also check a single box to make the entire search “Exact” so only items matching all of your criteria exactly are returned.  I think that using this filtering technique (some fields exact, others not) is the best way to get the most out of our search system.

3. Some activities in the new search take more clicks than they did in the old search

Although we’ve tried hard to make the new search experience stream-lined to save clicks in many ways, there are some activities that do indeed take more clicks to accomplish in the new search experience than they did in the old experience.  We’re looking into what we can do to improve that.  One idea we’re playing around with is allowing a keystroke that would bring up the “Refine Search” form up all at once for easier editing.  What do you think?  Also, what are the other areas where it is taking you more clicks?  Specific examples are very helpful.Overall, however, we have developed a new search experience that ultimately should save you clicks as you search for ancestors.

4. The “fuzzy” search engine should return better matches and filter out blatantly wrong matches

Absolutely agree.  We’re working on it—it just takes a long time to make the enhancements we’re hoping for.  Stay tuned.

5. You should focus on making exact searching more powerful (example: get rid of the three-character limit on wildcard searching)

This is something that we’re looking at very closely—we want to make our advanced researchers happy with the tools we provide.  As a result, I’d love to talk more with a few of you who consider yourselves to be advanced researchers to pick your brains on some ideas we’re thinking about in this regard.  If you’re interested, please send me a note to new-search@ancestry.com.

6. The new search is really designed for “fuzzy” searching

Although we did think a lot about “fuzzy” searching in the new search interface, we also considered exact search very carefully.  We added the “View” option to the search results (look for a drop-down on the right-hand-side of the search results) that lets you see the search results Summarized by Category so you can easily see the list of matching databases—this is particularly useful for exact searching.  Additionally, we made exact searching more powerful than it used to be because you can now specify whether you want a particular field exact or fuzzy on a particular database.  For example, you can now say I want to see results only where the residence was “Spokane, WA” and the last name is “Smith” but leave the first name as a fuzzy result for “John”. 

7. The location type-ahead feature doesn’t work well for counties and/or when searching a specific database

We’re reviewing the way that the location type-ahead feature works to improve it.  Specifically, we’re adding in the county names into the type-ahead list to make it easier to see what county you’re searching on.  When you’re searching on a specific database, we’re also looking into constraining the list of place matches to only matches that are available in the database.  If you have other feedback on the place type-ahead, please let us know.  We’d love to hear it.  Finally, I want to reassure everyone that we’re taking your feedback very seriously and looking carefully at ways to improve the new search experience.  Please continue to send constructive, specific examples and feedback to help us in that process.

Before I begin, I think that it is important to explain that most people really like the new search interface.  According to our research, over 75% of the people who have tried it out think that it is at least as good as the old search experience, and over 50% think that it is significantly better than the old search experience.  That’s a great start, but we’d like even more of you to be happy with the new search experience–so we’re going to keep working on improving it.

It’s also important for me to clarify something about the new search.  Nearly all of the search changes you see are in the interface, not in the search engine itself.  That’s because making a change to the interface is usually more straight-forward than making a change to the search engine.  Changing the search engine is more like turning a huge boat–it is a big operation that takes a long time!  But that doesn’t mean we’re not working on it.  In fact, we’ve been toiling away on some good improvements to the search engine that should make searching Ancestry.com easier.  I hope that I’ll be able to announce some of those changes in the next few months. So, while our search engine team is trying to “turn the ship”, we decided to make some changes to the interface to make it easier to use.

Now on to the concerns.  Here is the general gist of a few of the recurring concerns…

Concern #1: The search is returning results that aren’t even possibly right (Examples: Searched for someone who died in 1861 and got back a match for the 1930 US Federal Census. Searched for a person born in West Virginia but get back matches from the British Isles).

This has to do with the way the search engine works–it basically looks for any possible match that might be for your ancestor.  Now it’s unlikely that a death in 1861 was mistranscribed and should have been 1961, but it is possible.  Thus, the engine will return the match if other elements of the record look similar to the search criteria even if something looks wrong, just in case the input data was incorrect.  That said, this is something we’re trying to improve to make the search engine stricter when it comes to dates that are clearly outside of the person’s lifespan.  As for the location fuzziness, we return these matches because they could possibly be for the right person—we find that often times users inherited incorrect information about their ancestors and/or they didn’t realize their ancestors lived in a different location for a time period.  I’ve had this happen to me several times in my research.  That said, I know it is aggravating when you know a match is wrong and you still get it.  We’re trying to improve the search engine to make it stricter on locations as well.

I tried a ranked search in both the old and the new systems for John Williams b. 1782, d. 1861.  The first matches I got were in the US Federal Census Mortality Schedules in the right time frame.  The only way a 1930 match would appear first is if the search engine did not find anything that was closer in terms of the names, places and the dates I searched on.  Now, if I want to get only results that closely match the death date, for example, I can simply click on “Advanced” in the new search system, open the death information and click the “Exact” checkbox for the death year.  (I can make timeframe a little broader by giving it +/- 5 years.)  When running this search, I could not possibly get back any 1930 census results because the dates do not exactly match any data in the 1930 census records.  Similarly on location, I can simply check the “exact” box next to the location I want to match exactly, and I will receive only matches with that location.  Using the advanced features is simple and will weed out the other partial matches.

So the bottom line is that we think we can eventually make the search engine stricter on these types of matches.  You can also use the “Advanced” functionality in the new search to limit the results you get back on a particular field to only those that exactly match what you specify–this should also eliminate any of those erroneous 1930 census matches or the British Isles matches.

Concern #2: I can’t find what I’m used to in the new search, but I can in the old search

I’m not sure exactly how to respond to this issue.  We’ve done a significant amount of testing, and nearly all of the searches between the new and the old search return the same results when they’re entered the same way.  If you find examples where they are materially different, please send VERY SPECIFIC EXAMPLES to new-search@ancestry.com and I’ll take a look at them and see what we can learn (please include the URLs/addresses to the results so I can see them).

Concern #3: The card catalog is hard to use

I agree that the card catalog isn’t as easy to use as it should be.  We’re working on making it a lot easier to search the card catalog, rather than only being able to browse it.  We’re also trying to make it more intuitive and use the space better to display more matches in a single screen.  Hopefully you’ll begin to see some of those changes in the next couple of weeks.

Concern #4: Ancestry.com indexes are low quality–you should spend time fixing the indexes rather than improving the search

Building indexes from hand-written records is extremely difficult and time-consuming, and is as much an art as it is a science.  My first experience indexing old records about people that weren’t in my family lines was a humbling process.  We spend six months training each of our indexers to understand nuances of old handwriting in order to bring more content online quickly while still meeting quality standards–we also spend millions of dollars each year making records available.  I know that our indices have transcription errors in them–any indexing process does.  To help combat this common problem, we encourage anyone who finds an error to provide corrections to the names in our indices. Those name corrections are usually re-indexed as alternates within weeks of being submitted.  In order to submit a comment or correction on a record, simply click on the “Comments and Corrections” link on the record page.  We’re also working on ways to allow you to correct any information on the records, not just names.  Additionally, we have internal maintenance projects to improve the records we already have online.

That said, I think the solution to this issue is really two-pronged:  (1) Allow anyone to correct mistranscriptions; (2) Have the search engine find fuzzy matches on names, dates, and places–our name search, for example, searches on exact matches, as well as matches from our name authority (full of alternate spellings), Soundex matches, and common abbreviations and misspellings.  This allows you to more easily find transcription errors.  Similarly, the fuzziness around dates and places also helps with transcription errors on elements other than names.

Concern #5: The location fields in the new search don’t recognize counties

The location fields in the new search do recognize counties.  You can simply begin typing the county name and select it from the type-ahead list.  For example, if I start typing “Utah” in the location field, the type-ahead listing gives me an option for “Utah, USA” (this would be the state), and the next option is “Utah, Utah, USA” (this is Utah County in Utah).  Now if I type in “Payson” I get a choice for “Payson, Utah, USA” — that doesn’t mean that the county won’t be searched, it is just that we’re not displaying it in the limited space available in the search box.  We still search on the county as well as the city.  I hope this clarification helps.

Concern #6: I keep getting zero results in the new search

I think I understand what’s happening here–one of the neatest features in the new search is that it remembers the information from your Ancestry.com Member Tree, and when you begin typing names into the search box, you can select a name from your family tree and it will fill out the whole search form for you.  Obviously, your tree may contain many details about the person for whom you’re searching, including the names of their parents, siblings, children, their birth and death information, etc.  As a result, checking the “Exact matches only” checkbox would return only matches that both have all of that information specified AND match each element exactly–finding such a match would be a truly rare event.  Thus, your best bet is to avoid checking the “Exact matches only” checkbox when using this feature.  Instead, turn on the “Advanced” options and select a few of the fields that you want to be exact rather than the entire set of fields.  For example, you may want to mark only the surname, the birth year, and the birth location as exact–this should give you a small set of good matches.

Thanks for posting your comments about our search experience.  Your passion for our products and family history research really come through.  That’s what we’re trying to do with the new search–make that experience easier for everyone.  We’re dedicated to improving the new search experience on Ancestry.com to make it better and better, and your feedback is valuable in that process.

or you can just click here: http://search.ancestry.com/search/preview.aspx

Don’t worry, if you want to switch back to the old search (although I can’t possibly imagine why you would!? J ), all you have to do is click on “Switch back to old search experience” and you’ll be back to the old interface again.

Here are some of the features that I think make the new search a great improvement over the old search:

• Type-ahead tools
  • As you type information into a search field, we forecast what you’re typing and make it easy to automatically fill out the search form based on the information in your family tree.  If you don’t have a family tree on Ancestry yet, you should add one just to try this out.  It’s really a time-saver.  We also added type-ahead functionality to the location fields on the form so that you can search for any place out there, not just one in the limited dropdown fields in the old search experience.

• Image snapshots
  • Now you can see a preview of newspaper and book pages highlighting your search terms so you can tell if a match is relevant or not without having to click through to it.  This should be another big time-saver when you’re looking at books and newspaper matches.

• Site-wide search
  • We’ve made it easy to search all of Ancestry at once without sacrificing a thing.  You can also narrow down to improved categories and sub-categories of information.  For example, you can narrow down to Births, Marriages, and Deaths, to see a lot of vital records, but now you can narrow down again to just the Births or just the Deaths, so you don’t have to wade through all of them at the same time.

• Powerful card catalog
  • It’s easy to sift through the more than 25,000 titles on Ancestry with our new-and-improved card catalog.  Now you can sort the information in the catalog, and narrow by location, time period, category or language of the content.  It’s really handy, so give it a try.  You can also search for a keyword in the title or description of a title as well.

• Advanced searching
  • You can click on “Advanced” in the top-right of the search form, and turn on Exact match filters for each field in your search.  This allows you to mark a specific field as “Exact” while leaving the others fuzzy—it’s very powerful because we’ve added this functionality to each database.

• Summary view of search results
  • Now you can easily switch between sorting the results by their relevance or listing them out in a summary view that lets you see which databases got the most matches.  It’s nice to be able to switch between the two views so easily, and it gives you the best of both worlds.

• Adjustable text size
  • You can quickly adjust the size of the text so that it is easier to read.

We’re still working on even more improvements to search, so it should just keep getting better and better.  Go ahead, give it a test drive!

Over the past year, we’ve taken a close look at the Ancestry search process and asked our customers what issues they face when trying to find content on our site. Based on this feedback, we’ve been working on some new search features that we believe will make searching for records about your ancestors easier, faster and more effective.

We’ve made a New Year’s Resolution at Ancestry to do a better job of involving our customers in product enhancements early on so we can respond to feedback and make products that really meet your needs. That’s why, even though we were hoping to roll out the new search system earlier this year, we decided that it was absolutely critical that we invite some of you to try it out and give us direct feedback based on the new system before we launched it. So we invited a few lucky customers to take the new search for a spin and tell us what they think. We’ve been soaking up the feedback and we’re still busy making changes to improve the system based on that feedback. That said, it’s getting pretty close to time to launch it to a wider audience.

So, before long, we plan to begin a beta (fancy word for a preview) period of the new search on Ancestry, so you can all try it out. It will be what we call an “opt-in” beta, meaning that you can choose whether or not you’d like to try out the new search. If you decide you want to try it, you’ll be able to easily switch back to the existing search functionality at any time during the beta period by clicking on a “Switch Back” button on any of the search pages. We hope you’ll give us some good feedback on the new search during this beta period so we can continue to improve it.

If you’d like to take a quick tour of the new features and be one of the first to hear about the new search beta when it launches, visit: http://search.ancestry.com/search/SignUp.aspx

Kendall

P.S. – Here’s a quote from one of our early testers: “It was the best item I have personally ever tested for [Ancestry]. I am really excited to see this new enhancement become available on their site. So look forward to exciting things from Ancestry.”

• Dale writes: “I am searching for a rare surname, ENEVER. It is frequently misspelt… When I do an exact search I only get a fraction of the responses I know are out there. When I do a non-exact search I get over 10,000 results…”
• Terri writes: “… it is frustrating to have so many hits come back when I’m looking for something pretty specific.”
• Lauri writes: “… When I say that I’m looking for someone who died in 1852 and the first person on the list is born in 1945 and the rest of the search result looks like it is in random order, I call that a VERY poor search function.”
• Diane writes: “Am echoing earlier comments but only so you know how many of us want the same basic search features: Ability to restrict a search to a specific locale yet without the exact name. Example: I know the person was in Spokane in 1920 but don’t find with exact name match (name is typically spelled incorrectly). If I do a non-exact name search, I get all the US and it’s painful to narrow to Spokane. “
• Melody writes: “…when I do a general search for people who lived and died in NC in a certain time period, I get records for people who lived everywhere, and in any year. Sometimes I’m forced to do an exact search because it’s the only way I can find something (if it’s spelled correctly). There are too many records when I do a general search.”

The Answer - Ancestry’s Advanced Search

As a budding genealogist, I too find that sometimes our search engine can return too many matches that seem to be irrelevant to the information I typed in. In fact, I heard that comment frequently enough from customers like you, that we completed a project some time ago that I believe addresses a lot of these issues - Ancestry’s Advanced Search.

Here’s what it looks like:

Advanced Search allows you to mark, on a field-by-field basis, what items you’d like to require to match exactly and what ones you don’t mind getting a “fuzzy” match on. This lets you, for example, do a fuzzy search for the name (to find alternate spellings) while forcing the birth year to exactly match a specific year or year range or forcing a birth location to exactly match a state or county.

That sounds good, but why would I want to find a “fuzzy” match?

This is a big question - we’ll start with names, then take on dates and places. As you may already know, names are often misspelled or mis-transcribed on historical documents. Even though you know great-grandfather’s given name was Ebenezer, there are countless ways Ebenezer may have been spelled and/or abbreviated on old records. Surnames can be even trickier because they can often change over time. For example, my last name “Hulet” was spelled “Howlett” as little as 200 years ago. Here are a few of the reasons names can be tricky:

• Spelling of the name “evolved”, often when a family member immigrated (In some cases, names are even translated directly from one language to another - example: “Zimmerman” in German could be “Carpenter” in English)
• A nickname is used (Did you know that “Polly” is a common nickname for “Mary” or that “Peggy” is a nickname for “Margaret”? These aren’t very intuitive because they sound very different from one another.)
• A name is abbreviated (”Charles” could easily have been written as “Chas.”, “Ch” or “C” on an old document)
• An ancestor may have spoken in a heavy accent or may have been illiterate so that a census-taker or immigration officer had to spell the name out phonetically
• The person who copied down the information from the original ledger (often the originals were discarded in favor of copies written by a scribe with nice penmanship) may have not been able to read the original or may have copied it down incorrectly
• Similarly, the person who typed the information into the electronic index may have not been able to read the original or may have typed it incorrectly

So what is one to do?? Luckily, this is where Ancestry’s search engine can be a real help. We use several techniques to find “fuzzy” matches for names. First, we have a “name authority” of alternate spellings for thousands of names that our search engine automatically looks for when you do a search. For fun, I poked around at our name authority for the name Timothy Sullivan (our CEO) and here’s what I found:

• “Timothy” had over 50 possible spellings in our list, including “Tim”, “Timothee”, “Timmy”, “Timmothy”, “Temothie” and “Timothe” just to name a few
• “Sullivan” had over 30 possible spellings in our list, including “Sulaven”, “Sullavin”, “Sullevan”, “Sulavin” and “Sullyvan”

In addition to the name authority, we also look for abbreviations of given names. We also use a phonetic algorithm called “Soundex” to do even more “fuzzy” matching on surnames (and we’re considering adding it to given names, too).

Could you imagine trying to think of all of the variations of the given name and surname, let alone trying to search each one? That’s an awful lot of searching ~ it would take over 2,000 manual searches, in fact, to search each unique combination of name variations. And Ancestry’s search engine will do all of those combinations for you in the blink of an eye on every search that you do that doesn’t mark the given name(s) and surname(s) as exact.

So that covers names. Dates and places are a bit more simple. Dates can be wrong for a number of reasons: many people lied about their ages (in one case that my colleague Lou Szucs identified, a woman in the US Federal Census aged only 12 years over a 30-year period!), sometimes the forms required people to round to the nearest five or ten-year increment, etc. Places can be wrong for a number of reasons as well: an unknown move or temporary relocation, an ancestor may have lived with another family or as a domestic servant or apprentice somewhere, etc.

Our fuzzy matching on dates basically looks for the years closest to the date you entered and scores them higher than records with years that are further away (all other things being equal). We don’t do a lot of fuzzy matching on places yet, but that is something we’re excited about pursuing in the future to make the search engine better.

To sum it up

Advanced Search gives you the power to easily specify which elements of your search you’d like to be “exact” (meaning that they must be both included on the resulting record AND match exactly as you’ve specified) and what you’d like to be “fuzzy”. This gives you power and flexibility to get exactly the type of matches you’re looking for–fuzzy enough to find the right records, but exact enough not to have to wade through so many matches that are less relevant.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

I’ve also really enjoyed getting to know members of the genealogical community, whether through NGS, FGS, other conventions and workshops, or simply online through various blogs and email exchanges. One thing I’ve learned along the way is that tapping into the community for guidance and feedback will only make our products better and help us meet your needs more effectively. I’m always open to feedback and want to use your ideas to make the search system more effective.

I realize that we have a lot of things about our search functionality that we can improve (and trust me, we’re working on making it better every day) - that said, we’ve come a long way. Ancestry’s search system has quickly become one of the largest search engines on the Internet.

Our search technology sifts through billions of genealogical records to bring you matches. If we were to print the text from those records out on paper, it would fill over 500 million pages printed on both sides - a stack of paper that would reach over 20 miles high in the air - that’s over 84 Empire State Buildings stacked on top of each other! You wouldn’t believe how much electricity it takes just to keep that system of thousands of computers running.

Just in case you missed it, my colleague, Suzanne Russo Adams (AG), recently held a webinar entitled “Search Like the Pros” that I think is very helpful when it comes to understanding the ins and outs of searching Ancestry. Be sure to check it out: Search Like the Pros webinar

We’ve got some exciting things coming up on the search front that I’m itching to tell you more about, so stay tuned!

- Kendall