Search Enhancements, March 2009
Apr 14th, 2009 by sharbrough
Winnowing by title
Returning to the home page, and choosing the keyword search, I typed the surname “Bush” and pressed enter. I saw 452,737 results, of which 205,000 are newspapers and 75,000 are city directories. There are also 96,743 entries from the 1930 census. The list contains 60 titles (let’s not quibble over whether the 6 newspaper titles are 1 title, 6 titles, or 314 titles – I like counting it as 1 in this context).
If I then type “George” into the given name field, and “Bush” into the surname field, and press enter, I see 160,133 matches. There are 95 hits in the WWII Army Enlistment Records. Clicking on that link yields an unexpected result.
“Oops. Sorry, we were unable to complete your searcha t this time. We are working on fixing this at Footnote. Please retry your search. If this problem persists, please try your search again later.”
Some internet message boards contain complaints about the speed and reliability of the site. As this message implies, this is a temporary condition. Don’t read too much into it, and keep trying.
But that’s not the end of the unexpected results. Today, I didn’t have any difficulty with my search, but clicking on the link for the 95 results in the WWII Army Enlistments gave … 96 matches. Is it 95 or is it 96? For the time being, this quirk is going to be part of the search experience at Footnote, and users will have to deal with it, each in his or her own way.
I would also like to note that my previous choice, to eliminate OCR matches, was not preserved. The user would have to make the choice again, but as a researcher, I’m not troubled by that. Knowing the scope and scale of the OCR matches could be useful to me, and I can remove them with a single click. I realize that the context of each search could be very different, and don’t mind seeing this choice preserved, when it was previously made in a completely different context.
The 96 results can be narrowed by the fields in the enlistment records. I want to point out that this title does not lead to any images, but instead leads to “Footnote Pages” – web pages about each of the enlisters. One difference between Footnote Pages and images is that users are not able to take a “quick look” at Footnote Pages. This database was not created by the mainstream Footnote process of scanning records and then keying the data. In this case, it was created by using a database created by the National Archives. If you are not familiar with AAD databases at NARA, it’s worth looking into.
The search result has some other features that are helpful to users. The “Refine your search instantly” box shows a breakdown of the 96 records by surname. There are 94 Bush, 1 Harris, and 1 Sawyer. That’s curious. The Bush W Harris Jr enlistment was at Ft George. The web page for Paul B Sawyer’s enlistment includes a story from his autobiography, submitted by Footnote member PBSFamily, which states that he was a classmate of GHWB at Philips Academy in Andover MA. I like it.
