How to use WikiTree+ search for "Acknowledgments" plus manager?

Question

I would like to search the biography text of all profiles I manage for the word "Acknowledgments". Some do exist.

I tried the WikiTree+ text searches "Richardson_25415 Acknowledgements" and "Manager=Richardson-25415 Acknowledgements" (and also with "Acknowledgments" just in case). The "Max Profiles" parameter is set to the default of 500. None of these searches found anything.

What am I doing wrong? Does WikiTree+ text search not look in the biography text? Or does it ignore headings? Or is "Max Profiles" relevant?

Edited to add tags "help" and "improvements", to draw attention to the request below to amend the help page for WikiTree+ "text search".

Comments

"Richardson_25415 Acknowledgements"

Is this right? Shouldn't that be "Richardson-25415 Acknowledgements"?

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Thanks for the suggestion Ian, but no. The help page says:

• Managers WikiTreeID (you have to replace - with _ For instance Trtnik_2)

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OK. Sorry. 

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I don't know, but this may be due to your privacy level.  Here are the results for a getAncestors search on your ID:

The full results are:

[
    {
        "user_name": "Richardson-25415",
        "status": "Permission denied"
    }
]

I imagine WikiTree+, as it is not officially part of the site, runs by the same rules as the rest of us and can't return any results for you.  You may have more luck if you log in to the API.

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Good idea, but that doesn't actually seem to be the problem. If I do a search for just "Manager=Richardson-25415", WT+ finds all the profiles on my watchlist without difficulty. So either permission is not required, or WT+ has the requisite permission. Anyhow, isn't WT+ searching an archived database of Aleš's own rather than WikiTree live?

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That's a good point - I guess logging into the API is irrelevant.  I think my brain is melting... I'm confused.  I can't see what permissions he has or how he gets them, but... that's OK.  

Back to your question - I think you may be right - maybe it's not searching bios.  I just did a couple of similar searches for specific text on some of 'my' profiles and got no results.

Edited to add: I went to 'Persons tree' and tried your ID but only got your name back, which is what I would expect from a privacy point of view.  I guess, somehow, your ID goes to his site and that gives him the permissions somehow...  Never mind - this is not really the point...  

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Hmm, interesting. Thanks for doing a test search of your own managed profiles. That does seem to confirm that the biography text is not searched.

If you look at the help page I cited above, it gives a long list of fields that are searched, but these don't seem to include the main text of the biography. On the other hand, the help page does say

This is the Google-like keyword search. Simply enter all the words that must appear in the profile. If all are found, the profile is shown in the results.

Searching the biography text would I imagine be one of the main things that people might want to do, so if WT+ doesn't work that way, maybe the help page should explicitly say so.

Answer 1

wikitree+ does not search the 'biography' for words, such as Acknowledgements, etc.  

It would be nice if it did that, but it doesn't.

Comments

Thank you for the confirmation, Linda. This is what Ian and I had begun to suspect.

But this means that WT+ search is not really Google-like, since the great feature of Google is that it does search the full text of webpages. It would be good, as I said above, if the WT+ help page could be amended to make it clear that the biography text is not searched.

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You have to use the 'magic words'.  The Help page needs to identify what the Magic Words are for each item listed, because they are not really listed.

Answer 2

Biography is searched only for a few things, that I programed it to. To add complete biographies to the search engine is way too much data for our program. All biographies are taking 27Gb of my disk space and they are compressed. Maybe at some point in the future.

And to answer another question, Only profiles with public biography are searchable.

And about the google search, many profiles are not in the google index at all and will not be returned from google.

I do have all headings extracted from the biographies and I can do a search on my end, if you really need it.

Comments

I imported the heading data and 1,577,428 profiles have Acknowledgments heading.

And when cross checked with Richardson-25415 you manage 6 profiles with Acknowledgments heading.

Cheesbrough-352
Cheesbrough-390
McAuslan-30
Pring-242
Rewell-5
Winn-2601

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Thank you, Aleš, both for the explanation and for doing the heading search for me. It does make sense that the huge numbers of profiles WikiTree now has would make it impossible to search all their text.

But in this case, and given that it's called "Text search", I think it's important that the help page be amended as I've suggested to make it clear that the full text of biographies is not searched, so that others in future won't make the same assumption that I did. I hope that such a change to the help page can be arranged.

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I updated the help page.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:WikiTree_Plus#Text_search_2

Is it understandable now?

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It looks good to me, but can I point out typos?

Due to a huge amount of data in the biography, only a few parts are searchabe

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Due to the huge amount of data in the biography, only a few parts are searchable

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Thank you for the help page update, Aleš: this is certainly an improvement. I'd be happier still if it said

Due the huge amount of information in the large "Edit Text" boxes of biographies, this text is not searchable. Instead, numerous "metadata" fields are searchable, like GEDCOM file name, template names and parameters, category names, domain part of links, ...

I don't think we'd need the scare quotes around metadata ourselves:-) But the word might be mystifying to some people without them. 

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I think that is too technical for average wikitree user,

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The word metadata can be omitted. What is important is to say explicitly that the text in the main biography box is not searchable.