Create a search list by date and last name wild card

Question

In trying to clean up and merge pre-1600 profiles, the hardest part is all the variations on the spelling of the last name.   My example is Youngs, Young, Yonges, Younges...

If we had the ability to do a search based on a date or birth or century of birth and have a wildcard in the last name field, I think it would help.   In the above example, if I could search for date of birth 1585 +/- 12 years and last name 'Yo*', I could find all the duplicates and work them in one list.   Right now I open up 5-6 tabs of the surnames, sorted by birth, and then bounce back and forth trying to find duplicates.

Does this interest others?   I realize that this would have to be well thought through to create a manageable list (under 100 profiles), but, I think it would help those of us trying to clean up the multitude of duplicate profiles that exist just due to alternate spellings.

Comments

Thanks Robin! I added this to the To-Do list we started last week to help the team keep track of suggestions and....well... to-dos. :)

http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/To-Do

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That would be really great indeed and very helpfull, so YES this really does interest others  Thanks for posting and Eowyn thanks for adding this to the To-Do list 

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I love the idea.

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You can already search using wildcards in the People:Search page. I usually put in the first name (or part with an *) then in your case I would use Yo*, set the date to plus/minus 12 or 30, depending on how common the name is.

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I'm confused, can't you already do this, as Anne says? http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Special:SearchPerson

Is there something we're not understanding?

Taking off the to-do list for now.

Answer 1

Great suggestion, Robin!  You don't need to go back to the 17th century to find spelling variations in last names - I have a lot from the 19th century.  I'm sure that adding a wild card search in the last name will help a lot of us find more people, and maybe avoid duplicate entries.

And thanks for posting the list to the new To-Do List, Eowyn.  What a great idea!  I hope it appears in the WikiTree email blast and spur the creative ideas of other contributors.

Answer 2

This would be awesome! For now ... we do have the custom Google name search to circumvent the internal name search. it's here:

 

https://cse.google.com/cse/home?cx=partner-pub-5983849578006601:2801067696

 

It's alright, but it gets slammed by the most popular hits to particular profiles.

 

I also made my own Google custom search anyone can use. It sweeps up the content from the entire site: profiles, categories, spaces, G2G forum, etc.

 

https://cse.google.com/cse/publicurl?cx=012267546731583674077:odrk-noypve

Comments

Bree, what do you mean by "it gets slammed by the most popular hits to particular profiles. "?

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It's the typical Google popularity game... The more a link gets clicked, the more it gets pushed to the top of the results, and tends to bury the less trafficked links.

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Thanks for the clarification. What's the impact of that on wikitreers using it here?

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Pretty much take it at face value. The custom search is a Google product. And Google's search is subject to the programming of Google's algorithm ... which changes from time to time. 

What does not change is that Google hits aren't based on the best selection (i.e. -- the most relevant/logical choice) ... it's literally based on popularity. So for instance... if I use the custom search for categories, and I type in slave-owner... It will serve me up the slave owners specifically in Virginia at the top of the list. There's no alphabetical sense to it... Google gives me that hit because that particular page has grabbed the most traffic.

 

So with any custom search, if we type in say... a particular last name, the most popular person with that last name (i.e. -- the person whose gained the most hits), will be the first seen. This is okay... but it can be problematic when we get to names like John Smith. That's when we we want to be more specific in our searches with dates, locations, biographical info, etc...

 

I want to add something important here... WikiTree has one significant advantage that I absolutely adore. The VITALS section of every profile uses "MICRODATA". Without boring everybody... that basically boosts the ranking of every profile page. In fact, I personally believe that because we have the luxury of this awesome technical feature... it's not necessary to repeat that information in the biography text section. 

 

I might go one step further and say... I'm even against repeating that info [word for word]... because Google demotes a page for redundant content.

 

However, consistency is the recommended approach by the staff, and our Style Standards are meant to support that... [This helps the members get up and running without having to be SEO gurus.]... So it's okay that members do, especially since it may be the only info they know about an ancestor. So the key is then to REWORD that info or list it out in a different manner, so Google doesn't bust the page.

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Wow, that's really important to understand. Thank you!!

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I'm so glad I didn't bore you! Normally, I'm afraid to talk about this stuff since it's very dry conversation:D