Hi WikiTreers,
Some major improvements to our search engine just went live. Search is fundamentally important to our single family tree mission, and these are significant improvements, so I'm very excited to announce that they're finally online.
There are behind-the-scenes efficiency and ranking improvements, but what you will notice is that you can now limit results by:
1.) birth or death location(s).
2.) parents' name(s).
3.) gender.
There have also been improvements to the handling of last names. In addition to ranking improvements, you can:
4.) Exclude last name variants, e.g. so Smyth and Smits matches are not included with Smith matches.
5.) Limit last name matches to the last name at birth or married/current last name.
You can combine search criteria in creative ways. For example, you could search for all the Aldens born in Plymouth between 1670 and 1730. Or all males named John born in Mass* in the 1620s or 1630s.
There are some things we're still working on. Most of the changes only apply to the main search engine, not the automatic matches when creating new profiles and in GEDCOMpare and FindMatches. We are also working on the ability to page through more than 100 results, and improved handling of certain non-Latin characters in certain fields.
If you spot any bugs, or if you have other ideas for improvements, post them here and Jamie will collect them.
Onward and upward!
Chris