Search Enhancements, March 2009
Apr 14th, 2009 by sharbrough
This is the unofficial Footnote Blog. There is also an official Footnote Blog. On 30-March, when Footnote rolled the 1930 Census, they also announced enhancements to the search function on the site. The announcement said, in part:
Search Updates
We’ve received some great feedback about searching Footnote and we’ve made some significant improvements based on your suggestions. The new search results page makes it easier to narrow or broaden, refine and change your search. Now you can select the kinds of results you want and remove or add matches found though OCR (Optical Character Recognition–the computer read text of newspapers, city directories and other typed documents). You’ll also find an improved quicklook and an option to add an image to a Footnote Page right from the search results. This intro video provides more details about the new search.
Let’s review these changes.
Search Enhancements
The list of enhancements is:
- Easier narrowing of your search
- Easier broadening of your search
- Add or remove OCR results
- Improved quick look
- Add an image to a Footnote Page directly from search results
One of the first things that I noticed was a change in the “hourglass.” When you type in a search phrase, such as “George Bush” you now see a box that says, “Searching, your results will appear shortly.” A circle of dots appears to spin while you wait. I thought it kind of looked like the European Union logo.
Let’s back up and talk about the two kinds of search. In the beginning were Exact Matches, where the search result was a list of records in the index containing exact matches to your search parameters. In such an environment, putting everything you knew about a person produced zero results, which showed up about 1/4 of the time at Ancestry.com in late 2003. To help people find relevant information, Ancestry introduced a search feature designed to produce records that were similar to your search query, but not exactly identical. They called it “Ranked Search” and it’s been through a half-dozen names since. It’s a fine idea. What if only the spelling of the name was different, and the birth year and other information were all the same or close?
The truth is, the variation of names and dates and places in records is the rule, not the exception. If you want to find all of the records about a specific person, you have to find records that don’t have the right information in them!
It’s not such a radical idea. Google searches have been producing non-exact results for years, and will occasionally even suggest that you might have mis-spelt your search terms.
At Footnote, search results have cleaned up quite a bit. Some users will remember when 300 of the 400 titles on the site were Small Town Papers, and the list of results was somewhat cluttered. No longer. My “George Bush” search produces 155,775 results. I get a very neat list, sorted in descending order by the number of matches, showing that 103,134 are in Newspapers and 47,223 are in City Directories.
Footnote publishes some records in series of similar titles. For example, there are Civil War Service Records for many different states. The search result rolls those up into a single entry, showing 183 results in my example, and identifying the “grouped” results with a green arrowhead, a bold typeface, and the indication that it includes multiple titles). This makes things a bit easier to scan. One can imagine that someday the vital records might all be grouped, or the records for a given war.
If you are not a paid Footnote subscriber, you will be pleased to see the word “FREE” next to some of the titles on the list. These, you can view right at home, without being a subscriber.
