Checking Facebook today, I saw that David Rencher of FamilySearch had posted this three days ago:
"May your holidays be full and your nights be late! Sleep is overrated!We just released a new way to search billions of full-text records using everyday language—no search form required. To use it, go to familysearch.org/labs to turn on the "Try Simple Search" experiment. Help us improve it by sharing your feedback."
This is for FamilySearch Full-Text Search collections. Interesting. Why haven't we been able to do this before? Does it work? Of course, I had to try it out:
1) Here is the FamilySearch Labs screen capture for the Simple Search feature:
The search results were:
Only 341 matches. I should ber able to look at those in a few hours.
3) Or I could use the Filters for Collectins, Year, Place, etc. I chose "Years" and selected 1700s:
That resulted in only 5 matches. I expected more.
4) I clicked on one of them and saw the typical FamilySearch Full-Text Search result:
I had not found thst record for George Wakeman before. Or the other records.
5) There are some evident guidelines here:
- Using just the name, a birth/death lie span and places results in many results.
- You will get results for persons with the name even if they are utside any birth-to-deah life span range.
- Using the Filters can reduce the number of matches to a century or a decade, and to specific countries/states/counties.
- It didn't find any matches for Connecticut, although he resided there for 35 years. Perhaps the Search is limited because I am not an LDS member or at a FamilySearch Center.
6) I wonder how much information I can use? I changed my query and asked for land records in New York (where I know there are some) and it did not find only land records only within the year range in the prompt.
7) At first look, this new feature seems to work finew, and should be much easier to use.
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