FamilySearch Full-Text Search Update -- 17 April 2025

 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, almost every week it adds new record collections and millions of records.  But how quickly?  The last update on Genea-Musings was FamilySearch Full-Text Search Update -- 12 February 2025, nine weeks ago (because it wasn't growing and I just remembered to check it today!). 

1)  Here is the Full-Text Search home page on 16 April 2025:

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. 1776-2025).  

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 "Last Updated" I can see:

It says there are 3,490 collections today (up 37 (+1.07%) from nine weeks ago). 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 so I clicked the "Records" title.  This week it is "United States, New York, Migrations, from 1901 to 2013" with 55,585,061 images.  This is down about 57,000 images from nine weeks ago.

Note that the last collection updated was on 20 March 2025.  They have not added a collection for five weeks.

2)  I also want to know how many records (images?) there are on Full-Text Search.  I added the year range "1500-1800" and saw:

I had to do this four times to get the full count of images using ranges from 1500 to 1800, 1801-1900, 1901-1960, and 1961-2024, and then added them up.

That gave me a total of all Records (Images?) of 1,278,713,247  (down 120,805,415 - down 8.63% from nine weeks ago).

3)  What about "Results" by Country?  When I added "United States" to the Place field, I had to break the year range into four groups to get answers and add them up.

It found 895,516,178  results (down 268,216,340  - down 23.05% from 9 weeks ago) for "United States."  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 = 34,037,022

*  Ireland = 14,995,030

*  Wales =  5,471,955

*  Scotland = 4,636,626

*  Canada = 45,657,736

*  Mexico = 13,408,363

*  Australia = 16,745,917

*  New Zealand = 165,560,489

*  France = 7,690,601

*  Germany = 12,850,341

*  Netherlands = 470,774

*  Belgium = 952,427

*  Poland = 3,909,582

*  Finland - 951,808

*  Sweden = 3,590,052

*  Norway = 2,886,337

*  Denmark = 1,851,543

*  Italy = 9,612,176

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).

4)  When I looked for these numbers last on 12 Febnary 2025, I found:

*  Number of collections:  3,453

*  Number of "Results" (with no search terms):   1,399,518,662 

And now the numbers are:

*  Number of collections:  3,490

*  Number of "Results" (with no search terms):  1,278,713,247

5)  The change over the last nine weeks for Full-Text Search is:

*  Number of collections:  up 37 (up 1.07%)

*  Number of "Results" with no search terms: down 120,805,415 (down 8.63%)

It appears that they added some collections, removed (or merged) some record collections, and added or removed some records to existing collections.  

I am surprised that there are fewer images on full-text search than there were nine weeks ago.  I would think that since they have used AI to transcribe and index the record images that they would want all of the available records transcribed and indexed.  Are the collections indexed and then moved to Historical Collections and removed from Full-Text Search?  I doubt it - I think they may have refined their counting and/or search algorithms.

6)  The FamilySearch Images collection has 5.662 billion images as I write this (an increase of 59.5 million, up 1.07% from nine weeks ago).  

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 22.58% of the "Images" collection processed as of today.

This is a Benchmark for 17 April 2025.  Let's see how quickly the numbers grow over the next few months.  

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