Could the Google Search on Profiles be enhanced please

Question

Whilst the Google Search on Profile pages is handy, it could easily be made a lot more sophisticated by making use of Google's advanced options (especially logical OR).  The variation below would make a really useful modification to the existing option (<fieldname> is part of the profile of course).

"<Last Name at Birth>, <Proper First Name>"|"<Proper First Name> <Last Name at Birth>"|"<Last Name at Birth>, <Middle Name> <Proper First Name>"|"<Middle Name> <Proper First Name> <Last Name at Birth>" <Birth Date> <Birth Place> ~genealogy

If it were possible to readily extract the year of birth from the date then this could be enhanced with <Birth Year minus one>|<Birth Year>|<Birth Year plus one>

Cheers

Comments

Hi Wombat,

I've been working on implementing this. Can you explain more about why you're using the specific combination you're using?

How come you didn't include any with the Preferred First Name or Current Last Name? A search for my name wouldn't be complete without including "Chris" instead of just "Christian" and a search for my wife's name wouldn't be complete without "Whitten." But at the same time, I don't think we want five or six different variations. Three of four would seem like a reasonable maximum. The user can also play with the combinations themselves, right?

Thanks again,

Chris

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The structure of my suggestion was coloured slightly by the fact that the profile is person specific and that you can't necessarily be sure that any other relatives have actually defined
BUT
I usually get best results from this style of searching to find combinations of people, especially husbands and wives with the place and year of their marriage.
The combination of those facts together normally focus in on genealogical references without needing the "~genealogy" tag.
I found that the key is defining each way that the names might be written on useful web pages - for emigres, passenger lists tend to be written with surname first and then given, etc.  Some sites might use a woman's married surname but others use her birth surname.
There are lots of combos that can be useful, the suggested combo was really to illustrate the structure of the google advanced search.
Cheers

Answer 1

Hi Wombat,

That's a great suggestion. I love it!

Chris

Comments

The google search combinations I use (for both husband and wife) are:

"first lnab"|"first middle lnab"|"middle lnab"|"first current"|"first middle current"|"middle current"|"nickname current" dob-20..dod+5, plus all combinations of alternate/other last names, and perhaps a state or country of birth or death or residence, including both abbreviation and full name. It provides the greatest liklihood of finding ancestors no matter which name or variaton they may have used.

This gets a lot easier with older profiles who generally don't have middle names, though many of them had nicknames or alternate names.

The date range is very important to try to narrow down the time period, again especially for older profiles.

If information or a name is particularly scarce, I also use "last, first" as well as "first last" combinations, since many genealogy histories are written that way.

I don't find 'genealogy' or 'family history' tags or words add much to the qulity of the results or eliminate unrelated results.