Recently, I was looking for naturalization records for the surname Durling. Notice that “Naturalization Records” indicates that there are 39 matches in 2 titles?

There are two titles for naturalizations in this search result.

Terrific. So I click on the line to see what the two titles are.

The 10 titles which are 100% complete, containing less than 1000 images

• Photos – WW II Japanese FREE
• Civil War Soldiers – Union – UT
• Ardelia Hall Collection: Wiesbaden Photographs FREE
• Custer’s Court Martial FREE
• Constitutional Convention Records FREE
• Foreign Letters of the Continental Congress FREE
• Photos – Coolidge FREE
• Photos – Eisenhower FREE
• Amistad – Federal court records FREE
• Town Records – Goffstown NH FREE

What’s the takeaway?

Footnote contains a combination of short and long titles. You would not want to judge the value of a title based on its size.

NOTE: The word “FREE” in a title means that it was free on Footnote.com on 17-Nov.

The titles having more than 250,000 images remaining to be completed on 24-Nov.

• Navy Survivors’ Certificates. 14,000,000 to go. There’s a good chance that this number is high, by up to five million.
• Texas Death Certificates UPDATED. 2,100,000
• Southern Claims Commission Approved Claims, 1871-1880. 1,370,000
• News – Poughkeepsie Journal UPDATED. 1,000,000
• Naturalizations – NY Southern UPDATED. 800,000
• Apollo Missions FREE. 650,000
• Civil War Soldiers – Union – MO UPDATED. 580,000
• Census – US Federal 1900 NEW UPDATED. 490,000
• WWII Captured German Records FREE UPDATED. 395,000
• Texas Birth Certificates. 350,000
• Census – US Federal 1910 NEW. 332,000
• Census – US Federal 1920 NEW. 300,000
• Naturalizations – NY Eastern. 276,000

NOTE: Remaining images are calculated from percentages, not from exact title sizes. As such, they are only estimates, and therefore rounded.

This last list does not include the “Widow’s Certificates.” There are about 165 million pages of these. Footnote and FamilySearch are in a pilot project to do 500,000, which is nearing completion.

What’s the takeaway?

Footnote tries to publish complete titles. This aids records custodians, because they can use the digital copy for circulation and reference, and retire the film or paper documents. It benefits researchers, because they can infer important information from a search, even if it does not include the name they seek. Footnote produced approximately 10 million images in the past year. If production continues at that rate, and if the count on the Survivor’s certificates is correct, something on this list will not be complete in late November, 2011.  I rather suspect that it till be done sooner.

Also, notice that six of the thirteen titles say UPDATED. That’s a sign the they have had pages added recently, and are in current production. Three of them say NEW, and those are also in current production. One might expect more additions in the short term from titles that are in those groups.

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.

There are so many things that one could say about Footnote.com. The history website was launched in January 2007. It’s not easy to decide where to start. So, let’s go chronologically. Before there was a site – before there was any content to discuss – there was a set of business practices taking shape. The general idea was an idea of treating customers the way that we like to be treated when we’re customers. From that general idea came a number of specific ideas, one of which is “The Long Runway.”

A “Long Runway” is something that is needed for a comfortable takeoff. It also is a phrase used at Footnote to refer to the practice of giving the customer as much information as possible before making a purchasing decision. We wouldn’t want to rush a heavy plane into the air, or encourage the user to buy without knowing if the thing offered is something that she wants.

I remember a time when a subscription site had a newspaper application. The user might search for “John Galt” and see that there is a hit. Before viewing the newspaper, the user had to subscribe to the publication, something costing roughly $50. After clearing that hurdle, the user would find that the words “John” and “Galt” are indeed on the document, and within an inch of each other. Unfortunately, they would not be referring to a single person, but perhaps to John McGraw and Willie Galt. It is a classic case of a “short runway.”

Footnote has a “long runway.” Searches in automatic indexes (like those for newspapers) produce results containing “hit highlighting” that shows the context of the hits, and a thumbnail view of the page(link to example search result). Further, the purchase decision doesn’t require an investment of $50 – the user can buy unlimited access for $8 a month, or $1.99 for a single image. Before there was ever a site, Footnote spent a year developing the site and the business practices to make the site represent the philosophy of the site’s founders. One of the tenets of that philosophy is “The Long Runway.”