Problem with Person Search

Question

Entering a search for James George Robinson (Edit - found profile with wikitree + with no dates), sort by Birthdate, select 500 results, select Exact match only.

When results are shown, check options.  100 results per page is shown, not 500. Sort is not by birthdate and there are plenty of names that are not Exact name only.

Select sort by birthdate and results are sorted, but there are other names, other than only James George, ie James William, Jacobus Roberts, Robeson, etc. Option of 'no, only exact name matches' is still selected.

Changing to 500 per page works, but there are still other names in the list. Selecting Next page gets a lot of names that are not exact names.

Edit - Using wikitree +, searching for James George LastNameAtBirth=robinson returned 4 records

Answer 1

Pressing the "Search" button performs a brand new search -- so things like sorting and # of results will reset.

Also the search is an "OR", not an "AND" -- so it will show any profiles that have "James" or "George" in any of the first name/middle name/nickname fields. That's why Jacobus Roberts (or as his profile has, Jacobus "James" Roberts aka Robinson) shows up.

Comments

Wouldn't AND make more sense and be more useful? If you want to search for James Robinson OR George Robinson, you can just do two separate successive searches.

---

The goal is to have the person show up in the results (especially when the search code is being used for duplicate detection).

Should an option be added to let people exclude matches that don't include all names? Probably, but I think it would mostly be useful for profiles where you already know all the names are included in the profile, otherwise you are probably going to get false negatives.

---

Yes please to an AND option.

Swedish church records and population registers obsessively include all the given names of a person all the time. So for an Anna Elisabeth there is no need to get all combinations including Anna (and "synonyms") and all combinations including Elisabeth (and "synonyms"). We rather have the opposite problem: we rarely know what she was called in everyday life: was it Anna or Lisa or Anna-Lisa? But that is a different matter.

Being able to switch between OR and AND in searching and matching would be very useful. When we get to emigrants Anna Elisabeth could very well be Anna in one US census and Elizabeth in the next - and may have a profile previously created from either.

---

Jamie, is it possible to give us capability of entering a Boolean search string, like google can handle?  I realize that not everyone would be able to make use of this, but I suspect that many members are well versed in creating advanced search strings - probably most of the ones who are so frustrated by not being able to get more precise results - and it would be a very big deal for these members to be able to do.

---

I'm not sure, but I can add it to the list of things to keep in mind when we work on upgrading SearchPerson.