Why the changes to searching family trees?
We’ve segmented search into different categories: • Historical Records • Family Trees • Stories and Publications • Photos and Maps Why did we make the changes? In general, the main reason we made changes to our search interface was to help our users find different types of content more readily. The information in our databases is not homogenous—while most of our databases contain information that has been tagged as a name, date, or place, many of our databases do not have this information tagged or even contain names, dates or places at all (a map, for example, typically doesn’t contain an ancestor’s name). It’s hard to find information that doesn’t contain well-tagged information (like newspapers, family & local histories, photos, maps, etc.) when the search form asks you to type in tagged information. It’s also very difficult to rank these different types of matches against each other properly. That’s why we made a search interface tailored to find each type of content most effective
