Wednesday, December 25, 2024

FamilySearch Full-Text Search Update -- 25 December 2024

I've always been a numbers guy, so when a database like FamilySearch's Full-Text Search comes along, I wonder if it is growing slowly or quickly.

The good news is -- It's still growing quickly, like every week it adds new record collections and millions of records.  But how quickly?

Here is the Full-Text Search home page:

The user can use the search fields to search for keywords, a name, a location (pick from a list), and a year range (e.g. 1776-2024).  

Or, the user can search for a specific collection using the "Find a Collection" search field.

There is a link to "Browse All Collections" which provides a list of the available collections.  When I click that, and select "Records" I can see:

It says there are 3,474 collections today (up 22 (+0.64%) from last week), and the list above by is sorted by the "Last Updated" date.  Clicking on "Collection Title" will provide an alphabetical collection list, and clicking on "Records" will provide the list by most records.   

I wanted to know which collection had the most images - this week it is "United States, New York, Migrations, from 1901 to 2013" with 55,639,859 images.  Here is the list of the collections with the most records (images?):


I want to know how many records (images?) there are on Full-Text Search.  I added the year range "1901-2024" and saw:


I had to do this three times to get the full count of images using ranges from 1500 to 1800, 1801-1900, and 1901-2024, and then adding them up.

That gives me all Records (Images?) of 1,215,133,696 (up 377,366,851  (up 45.04%) from last week)

What about "Results" by Country?  When I added "United States" to the Place field, I clicked and saw this for the year range 1941 to 2024:


I had to break the year range into four groups to get answers and add them up.

It found 1,128,599,085 results (up  ??? % from last week).  Since I used a "Place" search term, that probably mean the number of matches to the "Place" term on the available indexed images.  

Doing a similar test for different countries, I made this list today:

*  England = 20,541,192
*  Ireland = 14,738,674
*  Wales =  5,356,277
*  Scotland = 983,349
*  Canada = 45,622,979
*  Mexico = 9,541,550
*  Australia = 16,684,369
*  New Zealand = 6,712,805
*  France = 7,080,327
*  Germany = 12,302,332
*  Poland = 3,786,684
*  Sweden = 3,500,222
*  Norway = 2,801,601

Note that some of the "Results" numbers may not be for records in the stated Place (e.g., "France" might be a town in the USA).

When I looked for these numbers last week on 18 December 2024, I found:

*  Number of collections:  3,452
*  Number of "Results" (with no search terms):   837,766,845

So the increase over the last week for Full-Text Search is:

*  Number of collections:  up 22 (up 0.64%)
*  Number of "Results" with no search terms: up 377,366,851 (up 45.04%) 

It appears that they added many records to existing collections.

The FamilySearch Images collection has 5,570.0 million images as I write this (an increase of 7.6 million, up 0.014% from last week)

Lastly, we know that Full-Text Search is using the "Images" collection on FamilySearch to add them to Full-Text Search, to keyword index them, and to transcribe them.  So Full-Text Search has about 21.8% of the "Images" collection processed as of today.

This is a Benchmark for 25 December 2024.  Let's see how quickly the numbers grow over the next few months.  

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Copyright (c) 2024, Randall J. Seaver

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