Do we need an advanced profile search screen?

Question

The current search screen allows for name with options for date of birth.  In many cases this is not enough.  Search for John Smith for an extreme example.  Adding the ability to search based on parent's names and/or name of spouse would be a significant improvement.

The search should allow the entry of one or more of the following items: birth date, father's name, mother's name - both first and maiden, spouse, both first and maiden if female.  Adding place of birth would be advantageous as well.

Comments

I agree Philip. Having more information available when looking for duplicates would definately help make our job easier. Having numerous screen open at the same time to see all that different information is a royal pain.

Answer 1

Yes, I believe that an advanced search engine is necessary for the development and usability of the site, this is particularly accurate when we have reached a higher level of both active users and profiles. The ability to search for multiple variables and narrow down the search would be paramount to the merging of profiles and other search functions.

At the current moment it is exausting having to compare individual profiles before adding a new profile for the individual's tree. This is particularly requisite to save time, effort, and allow for faster maintenance of the site.

If we are to think about flourishing as a community, we must provide adequate tools to maintain the minial, yet obligatory daily tasks.

Comments

not appropriate to award yourself a gold star

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Thank you for letting me know that I had done that. I clicked it on accident.

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I'm new here and I was dismayed that there's no ability to narrow the search by location at least.  It's overwhelming the number of people that share a name all over the country.  I would consider it a great addition.

Answer 2

I'd certainly like to see a 'between dates' facility. I'm less worried about the others, because they may well vary between profiles. But in most cases it would be unlikely to find the same person with a birth date more than 10-years adrift.

Answer 3

A commercial website myheritage has all our data.  They have a nice search engine. For our website.

http://www.wikitree.com/g2g/40180/a-super-easy-search-engine-for-wikitree-is-here

Comments

Although I appreciate your link to the search engine provided by MyHeritage, I believe that creating a search engine for WikiTree would be too easy not to do. In addition, we shouldn't have to rely on an external source to provide for internal search.

Doing searches in this kind of method would be similar to going MySpace to do a search for Facebook.

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But if they have all the data, with out giving us credit, why not. How are you going to stop them.  I've tried, to no avail for quite some time.  Trying to get credit for work done here will get you nowhere.  We do the work entering data, sourcing, citations etc.  Some one here grants access, transfers access or sells the data, we might as well get a nice search engine out of the deal, we're surely not going to get credit for the work.

By the way, I do totally agree with you. (except the thumbs down part)

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I think we get a LOT of credit for our work. If you want to get paid, get a job at ancestry.com or something. If you want to make history... stick around. People appreciate what we do here more than you know.  If outside companies want to create ways to drive more people away from their style of family tree, and to a more educational style of family history research, why complain? They are literally sending us a following! Millions of people use wikipedia and nobody gets "credit" for making those profiles, but like us here, people have an interest in the data provided. Making that data available not only to ourselves, but to the people who will someday come to see this site as "THE place to go" for genealogy searches must be easily searched and thorough when found. An improved search engine with new search parameters is a huge step in the logically correct direction.

Answer 4

I posted this elsewhere quite some time ago, but you can use google to search wikitree like this:

site:wikitree.com komo "Fred Remus"

In that search, I was looking for records I loaded that had Kokomo, Indiana corrupted to "Komo."  (I, not Wikitree, am responsible for that goof)

You can use that for any type of search you can do on google and it will give you only results from Wikitree.

Fred

Comments

i use that feature in Google all the time... Technically, it should return the same results as using the "search for anything" option within WikiTree, but it doesn't.

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Fred,

Thank you.

Nice work around - good to have until we get the full functionality that we need on wiki.

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I use it for other sites, too.  Many sites have search capabilities that are limited at best, and some don't even have a search option.  Google is a good end run for those sites.

Answer 5

Fred's answer could be what I need.  Fred, do you know the syntax to search for a category or a space or a thing on WikiTree?  I want to be able to search the category titles for witch or witches and find Accused Witches of New England.  Similarly, I want to be able to search Spaces for library and find  Kitty's Library.  Do you know a way to do this?

I am aware of the 4. Search for Anything option but it only brings up profiles and G2G messages.  Thanks for any advise.  It is on my Wiki Wish List. 

Comments

In a quick check, the results of this search seem to include lots of hits that could be relevant:

site:wikitree.com witch

EDIT: Meant to mention, googles search algorithm finds forms of the word, so searching witch should also get you witches, etc.

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There is no special syntax for searching for other page types. The search for anything option doesn't just bring up profiles and G2G posts. It searches for anything. :) If you enter, for example, category witches, one of the results is that category page you mentioned. (Or in Google, search for site:wikitree.com category witches.)

The same should work for space pages, the problem being that there seem to be a lot of pages with "space" in them that aren't space pages. Here's where it would be nice if Google had a search by URL so that you could search for pages with "wikitree.com/wiki/Space" as part of the URL, but sadly Google lacks this operator.