I was working on Ancestry.com and clicked on the "Search" menu item and saw:
The dropdown menu for "Search" has a NEW option - "Search full-text."
A Google search for it can be seen in https://www.google.com/search?q=ancestry+full+text+search+feature which provides guidelines for use. The description of the feature is:
"Ancestry's full-text search feature allows you to search keywords within transcribed documents. going beyond traditional name indexes to find information in full sentences and paragraphs, a powerful tool similar to FamilySearch's advanced search, though Ancestry's implementation might focus on OCR-processed records and can be accessed via the Search menu for deeper discovery in collections like deeds, wills, and other records, leveraging AI for handwritten text recognition to reveal hidden family connections."
I clicked on the "Search Full Text" link and the page that came up was:
The top of the screen says "Search full text" and "Discover more by searching through all of the text in books, stories & newspapers."
There are three elements on this page:
- A search field with fields for First Name, Last Name, event Year, Location, and Keyword. The user can select "exact" for the names and Keyword.
- A "Search by category" list on the right that doesn't seem to work right.
- A list of "Search Tips" below the Search box.
Find an exact phrase
Use quotation marks around a set of keywords. Example: “brown eyes” or “coal miner”
Require or exclude terms or phrases
Use the + symbol or - symbol. Example: ‘+Esquire’ or ‘-farmer’
Find different spellings
Use the ? symbol to replace unknown letters. Example: Jens?n will return Jensen and Jenson.
Match any unknown part of a word
Use the * symbol for incomplete words. Example: Car* will match car, carriage, carpenter, etc.
I entered my grandfather's name in the search box using "Fred*" and "Seaver" and added the Keyword "Leominster." I clicked all three boxes to be Exact.
After c;licking the "Search" button, I received 119 matches:
I clicked on the first match - a page from a register of officers of the Society of Colonial Wars:
The page from the book is in the left-hand panel, and the transcription of the page is in the right-hand panel (it took about 20 seconds for it to appear).
I noted that there are no mentions of "Fred*" on the page, but there are mentions of "Seaver" and "Leominster."
The first match with a "Fred*" Seaver was the 25th match - a 1933 Leominster City Directory page.
Most search engines would put matches with all of the search terms at the top of the match list. However, "Frederick" was not highlighted in yellow, so perhaps using "Fred*" didn't work.
The feature page says it can provide a full text search for Books, Stories and Newspapers. Does it work on handwritten pages? All of the results I saw were for printed material.I expected to see matches from the Fitchburg, Massachusetts newspaper bt searching for Frederick Seaver, Frederick W. Seaver, Fred Seaver, or F.W. Seaver on the list but I found only 16 City Directory matches for Frederick Seaver and Frederick W. Seaver (none of which came up for "Fred*").
The user can copy the transcribed text and paste it in a word processing document if they desire. This will be most useful for book texts without columns. The transcript for the City Directory above is line by line which is a useless jumbled mess in the transcript.
This feature is not new, apparently. There was a Facebook post about a month ago about it. I don't think Ancestry.com has announced it - at least a Google search didn't find it.
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2 comments:
I don't have the full-text search option yet. Maybe they're rolling it out gradually.
Thanks for the comment, Rick. I'm surprised that I have it - I rarely get a "first look" at anything new at Ancestry any longer. Yep, probably a gradual rollout.
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