Miss the old search at Ancestry already? Read this post for some relief of the new search blues!

Now that I have cooled off from a morning of frustration with Ancestry and their insanity, I have found a nice work around that will get you back to some of the functionality and feel of the old search that isn't half bad. Sorry Ancestry, and all those Ancestry insiders and kool aid drinkers; your new search engine still sucks and nothing you can say will change my mind. I will illustrate point that later in this post.

First, you will need to open a new browser tab and jump over to Ancestry (keep my instructions handy) in another tab and do the steps that I have outlined and illustrated below.

Next, login to your Ancestry account. Good, now per diagram below click on pull down menu next to your account name and click on the "Site Preferences" menu option (click on picture to see a closer view).

Once you are on the "Site Preferences" page scroll down the page to the menu option "Search Preferences." (see below)

Click the box then hit the orange button titled "Update Preferences." (see below)

Now it is time to go over the search tab at Ancestry and click on it. You will get a screen that looks like below. Again if you have trouble seeing the graphic, click on it and it will enlarge for you.

At the bottom of the image above next to the orange button labeled search is a link titled "Hide Advanced" and you will then see the simple search form.

 

Now you should start feeling a bit more comfortable with the search engine you see above. I strongly suggest that you use the "Match all terms exactly" box if you have some exact terms you want to search for. So let's see how this works. I'm going to hunt for my 4th great grandfather Aaron Redus in Mississippi where he lived the later part of his life.

 

 

 

First here is a view of the search results with the category tab selected.

 

 

And now here is what it looks like with the records tab selected.

 

 

All in all this is manageable, what I wanted and expected to see. Since this search engine, like the old doesn't use their "fuzzy logic" you can use wildcards (an asterisk (*) and a question mark (?) to see expanded results. The question mark takes the place of any one letter. The asterisk can be used to indicate that any letters attached to the “known” portion of the name.

 

Uncheck the "Match all terms exactly" box and you will be back to the horror story known as the new search engine (see below), 57,199 results for the same search I did above.

 

 





If you use the "Show Advanced" function and check the "Match all terms exactly" box I still get the same result as I did with the "Hide Advanced" function. So if you can deal with a bit more screen you might improve your search experience by using the "Show Advance" function. Just remember if that "Match all terms exactly" box is unchecked, you will get a ton of stuff.

So hopefully this will help the few of us (Ancestry says there weren't many) who used the old search. Some of their volunteers on their FB page have belittled us as old people who couldn't grasp their new search engine and were still using televisions with knobs. Uh, to that poster on the Ancestry Facebook page, does the picture of my TV below look like it has knobs?

Nope, that is a 60 inch LED. Sorry we all aren't totally illiterate who liked the old search engine. Oh yea, that was a Nikon high end digital camera that took the picture.

As always if you have questions, please feel free to drop me some email at the address in the masthead and I will do what I can. If you are a student of mine in either Tuesday or Thursday nights classes, I will be in a bit early to address your questions in class.

Coming Soon to Ancestry.com Search—More Control Over Your Results? Really!

No one in the online or professional genealogy community has been more of a critic regarding the new Ancestry search engine than me. I will be the first one to admit that I have been a bit obsessive about this but with good reason -- IT WASN'T BROKE DAMNIT!

Bottom line - I hate it and I have told them so at every turn. Heck, I went on a new search engine rant the other night in class (I'm sorry folks it is like showing a bull a red cape).

Now the programmers at Ancestry have come up with another scheme (uh, I mean enhancement) to try and make something that wasn't broke to begin with better --- sliders (no Gayle they aren't talking about hamburgers sweetie).

From the Ancestry.com blog yesterday: "A new sliding control is coming to the Ancestry search function over the next couple of weeks. Located in the upper-left corner of the search results page, it will make it easy to quickly broaden or narrow your search results.  Don’t see the search results you were expecting? Simply drag one or more sliders from left to right to quickly modify your results.  The slider position shows how closely your search terms should be matched.  With all the sliders to the left, your results are matched at the broadest level, and moving one or more sliders to the right will display more exact matches. - See more at: http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2014/02/24/coming-soon-to-search-more-control-over-your-results/?sf1952133=1#sthash.18uRa7n8.dpuf

"In this first update, you’ll be able to use slider controls on these fields:First and last name of the person being searchedBirth and Death factsOne “Any event” factOne residence locationOther criteria in your search will still be available to edit using the “Edit Search” link and will be noted in the “Other” section just above the “Edit search” link.You’ll start seeing the sliding controls gradually over the next few weeks, so look for them soon on your search results page."

Are you kidding me? You mean to tell me you have time to invent a hamburger, uh, I mean slider feature and you can't fix all the issues or add new features for the DNA folks who have been left swinging in the wind the last two years?

What Ancestry needs more than anything else is some adult leadership in their new products development office (or whatever they want to call it), someone who is not wetted to a bunch of new bells and whistles and fluff on the front end and that doesn't work well on the back end.

Guess it is time to launch another feedback button rant. But hey, I pay my money just like everyone else so I have a right to complain when these folks just can't seem to get it right. Been a paying member since December 2000 longer than most all others in case you really want to know.

And if that wasn't enough now Familysearch, Ancestry and others have automated location information in their search engines. What I need to do is have them educated in one of my classes that there is no such place in 1620 as Jamestown, York County, Virginia, USA.

Are these people serious or do they only want to take the easy way out for the masses. I dare you to find a record or repository for someone in 1620 in Jamestown, York County, Virginia, USA

More on that rant very soon so stay tuned.

And the changes at Ancestry just keep on coming!

My record of teaching an Internet and Genealogy course, finishing it, and have the various websites that I taught in that class make changes is still 100%. Yep, those funny folks in the Product Development Team at Ancestry.com are at it again.

So now you guys who took my class last Spring remember the night we talked about old search and new search at Ancestry. Well the old search is going the way of the Dodo bird. Yep, the famed old search engine will be history in the next six months. The good news is at least they have done away with the result pages that had those gold colored stars. Those stars were suppose to rate the results you received based on the search criteria you put into the new search engine.

I'm sorry Ancestry, but that was the dumbest damn thing I have ever seen you do in the nearly 13 years I have been with you as a paying customer.

So the search engine below that has been around literally forever will be history soon.

So will the results page that was associated with this search engine (below).

The new search engine now looks like this.

On the results page you will have two different views of the search results depending on which tab you select in the upper right hand corner. Here is a view when the record tab is selected.

And here is the new search results page when the category tab is selected.

This second results page is more like the old search engine results page and for that I will applaud the Product Team at Ancestry. The other thing that I mentioned above is you got rid of those juvenile star results pages.

If you want to switch between the two search engines follow my instructions below.

First look at the toolbar at the top of the Ancestry page. Click on the search button.

You will then get a second screen that dumps you off your Ancestry home page and puts you at the current search engine you are using. Look at the upper right hand corner and there is a link that lets you select between the two different search engines (see below).

 

 

In my screen capture above clicking on the Go to Old Search engine in the upper right hand corner will take you to the old search engine.

 

Bottom line the old engine will be history soon so time to get use to the new engine. Here is the email I received from Ancestry about this situation this afternoon.

 

 

Tell us what you think

          Dear Larry,

Ancestry.com is continuing our efforts to improve the search experience across Ancestry.com and will be making changes to our search functionality in the upcoming months. Some features will be added and some will be discontinued. As part of the 2% of our subscribers that use the old search function on the site, we know that you are passionate about the search experience on Ancestry.com and we are reaching out to you to get input on potential improvements. We hope you will take the opportunity to share your insights and feedback on our plans.

To identify which areas of the experience we should focus on this year, we have drawn on customer input, usage data, usage patterns and our old search function for inspiration. From all of that, we are looking at making your time on Ancestry.com more productive by improving these areas of the search experience in 2013:

• More relevant search results with the best results at the top
• Easier refining and control of your search results
• Keeping a better history of the work you have done
• Publishing more new content and more corrections to existing content
• Performance improvements to return results faster

As we begin to make these improvements, we will no longer maintain two separate search systems for the site. Maintaining two systems limits the resources we can use to make improvements and increases the complexity of every improvement we try to make. Additionally, continuing to maintain the two systems limits our ability to direct more investment into other areas like adding more record collections and correcting existing collections.

Based on that, as a part of the work this year we will be bringing together the two search experiences into a single search experience on Ancestry.com. We hope to bring forward the best features of both the old and new search systems into the consolidated experience to facilitate the transition for our users and to improve the overall search experience. We expect to discontinue the old search function as a separate experience within the next 6 months.

As a user of the old search feature, we wanted to give you advance notice and let you influence the changes we are making in search. Please take this survey to share your feedback and ideas on key features to improve.

Best regards,
The Ancestry.com Product Team

So there you have it folks. Hey Ancestry now that we are focused and you have made improvements how about a DNA Chromosome Browser and improved ethnic DNA admixtures. Maybe a Xmas present, hint, hint!

Mocavo.com Launches as World’s Largest Free Genealogy Search Engine

Industry breakthrough provides instant search results for billions of names, dates and places worldwide

BOULDER, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mocavo.com™ (http://www.mocavo.com), a free search engine geared toward genealogists and people interested in learning more about their family history, launches today. Mocavo.com enables the search of more than 50 billion words - including billions of names, dates and places, all within fractions of a second. Mocavo.com fills an important industry need by providing the first large-scale, free search engine for family history research. Coupled with the speed and accuracy by which search results are produced, Mocavo.com represents a major technological breakthrough within the genealogy world.

Mocavo.com has already been met with critical acclaim by several industry experts. Dick Eastman, writer of Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter and a top blogger in the field, wrote, “All my future genealogy searches will start on Mocavo.com. I've been using the site for a while during its testing and have been very impressed. I suspect you will always have better luck searching for your own surnames of interest on Mocavo.com than on any other search engine.”

Randy Seaver, writer of the popular Genea-Musings blog, said, “Mocavo.com promises to be a genealogist's dream - a search engine focused on free online genealogy resources." Mr. Eastman’s and Mr. Seaver’s full reviews can be found at http://www.eogn.com and http://www.geneamusings.com, respectively.

Starting today, the general public can use Mocavo.com for free. Visitors to www.mocavo.com are simply required to type in the names of interest and click on Search. All related results from industry sources such as genealogy message boards, family trees, state and local historical societies, the Library of Congress, National Archives, Ellis Island, Find A Grave, the Internet Archive, various U.S. state archives, and many tens of thousands of genealogy sites built by individuals will be displayed. Similar to other search engines, Mocavo.com honors site owners by linking directly to their content.

Cliff Shaw, founder and CEO of Mocavo Inc., identifies the current trouble for genealogists and the solution that Mocavo.com provides, “Genealogy has always had the problem of information and potential clues being spread across thousands of disparate web sites and sources. Imagine a world where you have all of the Web’s free genealogy content at your fingertips within seconds. That is Mocavo.com.”

“Mocavo.com has the capacity to index every single piece of free genealogy content found anywhere on the web, and will be growing by leaps and bounds in the coming months,” said Mr. Shaw. “We expect Mocavo.com to shortly offer all of the web’s free genealogy information, searchable and accessible to all – something that has never been done before. It’s set to become the go-to search engine for every family history enthusiast.”

Mocavo Inc. is the brainchild of Cliff Shaw. Mr. Shaw is well known in the industry, having created four successful companies and many innovative technologies, including Smart Matching™, the most successful ancestor-matching algorithm. He created GenForum 14 years ago and it quickly grew to become the number one community for genealogists (now owned by Ancestry.com® (NASDAQ:ACOM)). In the early 2000’s, Mr. Shaw launched GenCircles and Family Tree Legends, becoming the number two family tree publishing site and number two family tree software package respectively (both are now owned by MyHeritage.com). More recently, Mr. Shaw launched the well-received BackupMyTree.com, the industry’s only automatic tree backup solution.

About Mocavo Inc.

Mocavo Inc. operates the world’s largest free genealogy search engine, Mocavo.com, giving genealogists access to the best free genealogy content on the web including billions of names, dates and places. Founded by industry veteran Cliff Shaw, and backed by prominent angel investor, David Cohen, (founder and CEO of TechStars), Mocavo.com seeks to index and make searchable all of the world’s free genealogy information. While Mocavo.com discovers new sites every day, some of the existing sites searchable on Mocavo.com include genealogy message boards, family trees, state and local historical societies, the Library of Congress, National Archives, Ellis Island, Find A Grave, the Internet Archive, various U.S. state archives, and many tens of thousands of genealogy sites built by individuals. For further information, visit http://www.mocavo.com.