A) We discussed this on the 23 April Mondays With Myrt webinar and several comments were made by the panelists and the viewers, including:
* Ancestry.com moved their entire server system, which housed all of their record collections and family trees, from an in-house server farm to Amazon Web Services
* A phone call to Ancestry by a user, which was referred to a manager, indicated that Ancestry.com fired their in-house IT department. The manager said it would take up to four weeks to fix the problems.
UPDATED: A comment from "Still here" on this post notes that:
"I work in the IT department at Ancestry and the in-house team was NOT fired, we are still here and working to solve the problems so that service will return to normal or better."
Thank you to "Still here" for the information.
I don't know how accurate the above comments are, but if the comments are true then the recent problems may be related to them.
B) One of my readers with database engineering and management experience made some comments in a Facebook message to me. He works on Ancestry.com extensively in the records and his tree, and made these observations on Monday:
* Unbelievably bad performance across the entire site (especially when new batches of DNA test results are being added to the database). Since processing costs increase exponentially as new tests are added to the database, and tests are selling very briskly, this problem is getting worse at an alarming rate. The site is virtually at a standstill this morning.
* Query timeouts
* Pages rendering with incomplete data (several data elements missing, presumably because the individual queries didn't come back in time - this also indicates very sloppy flow control - i.e., bad engineering)
* Major inconsistency between the number of results shown on the search summary page and the actual number of results found on the detail page - I can see that some query parameters are no longer getting passed from the summary page to the detail page).
* Defective sections in search summary result page (a section, e.g. family trees, will render without any information, and the link to the detail page renders no data, even though the search should have returned data).
* Incongruity between redundant search datasets (e.g., you click on a tree in the "public trees" section of the search only to find the tree is actually private; or you do a search by surname in the DNA matches only to discover that some of the trees in the result set no longer have anyone with that surname).
* Incomplete search results when you search by surname in the DNA cousin-matches. I used to get 15 pages of results when I search my matches for surname Hall, but lately I only get about 2-3 pages)
* Cousin-match search by birth location returns very inaccurate results. If you also specify a surname, the results are complete nonsense. This has been broken for a few years now (if it ever worked).
* While traversing from page to page in online trees, when I click on certain people, I get taken to a full-page ad trying to sell me a new membership, as if I were merely browsing as a visitor... while I am logged in! If I go back and forward a few times, it eventually takes me to the right place.
C) I asked him for examples and he sent these examples in email.
1) Subtotal on BMD section is incorrect (4 vs. 5).
2) Summary page says there is a match in the SS Applications index, but detail page fails to find it:
3) Search results incorrectly include private trees among the public tree results:
4) Summary search results include family trees that have been deleted:
Upon further review, it looks like the tree is still there, but the URL in the search result was no good. When a later search took me back to this same tree, I fund that the tree was actually there, and when I jumped to the person I was trying to access before, I found that she was still present in the tree, but the URL provided in the previous search was wrong. Upon closer inspection, it appears that the user changed the person's name from Betsey to Betsy, and changed her birth date slightly, but the search results still had data for Betsey's old record which no longer exists. Looks like they are having some real "transactional integrity" problems... bad engineering....
5) My reader also has comments and screen captures from his DNA Match pages but I'm not going to show them because I don't want to reveal his or his matches identity.
D) My comments are:
* I have seen most of these problems also, and they've gotten more frequent over the past two months. They are very frustrating when they occur on a regular basis. Some are probably explainable by a tree being deleted or made private.
* There may be more important issues with Ancestry.com search - if you have one, please make a comment to this post or send me an email with an example.
* Sunday nights seem to be a real challenge. I usually work in my Ancestry Member Tree Hints on Sundays, and last Sunday I had to reload a tree Hint page, and search result pages, five or six times before I received the requested results.
* Most genealogy researchers with experience recognize how very difficult it is to keep things humming on a system with billions of records with customers expecting near-instantaneous results that provide results that are responsive to their search requests.
* Most genealogy researchers recognize that Ancestry.com has the most complex and sophisticated search process and, when used consistently, finds records responsive to the search parameters used.
* Customer expectations are high because of previous good experiences, and when customers are unhappy and frustrated, well, complaints happen.
* I sincerely hope that Ancestry.com corrects their database and family tree search problems and provides the customer service at the highest level.
* I have to believe that Ancestry.com is aware of these database and search problems and is trying to fix them. However, they have not been very transparent in the face of complaints like the above and on Facebook.
E) Thank you to my readers for their input. Ancestry needs to hear these comments and reply with openness and truthfulness. Please don't shoot at the messengers!
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