Ancestry Scottish Census search acting up?

[SarahND]

Hi all,
I have noticed in the past few days that the ancestry search is getting too powerful for its own good. When I search for, say, someone named Margaret, born 1849 +/- 5 years in Berwick* it will give me in the results list all the names of people in a household that contains someone named Margaret, someone born 1849 +/- 5 years, and someone born in Berwick*, even if they are not all the same person!!! In other words, it is treating my search as if I just wanted those three bits in the household somewhere, rather than that I want one person who has all those attributes
Anyone else noticed this?
Regards,
Sarah

[emanday]

Don't know why you got that result, Sarah. To test it out I've just done the exact same search and all I'm getting are Margarets.

Maybe a temp glitch, or have you got any of the "Exact" boxes ticked?

[SarahND]

Shouldn't "exact" give you narrower results? In any case, I always have "exact matches only" ticked, so that is nothing new... and these results are. I sent a message to ancestry asking about it...

[sheilajim]

Hi Sarah

They also have a star rating for the search. one star, two stars, three stars, etc. I usually check on two stars, if there are too many returns I will check three, etc. That usually narrows it down.

Regards

Sheila

[SarahND]

Hi Sheila,
The stars are when you uncheck "exact matches", right? Does it give you all sorts of other people who have only some of the characteristics that you are searching?
Regards,
Sarah

[kathyc]

Sarah,

I had the same sort of thing happen yesterday. I was searching obits, not census records, but the results were just as you described. I haven't tried it today to see if it's back to normal or not.

Kathy

[SarahND]

Thanks, Kathy! So I'm not crazy yet It is only happening to me on the Scottish censuses, not the U.S. ones, so I don't know what's up I'll let you know if I get an answer from them.
Regards,
Sarah

[sheilajim]

Hi Sarah

Yes, when you don't check "exact search".
It depends on how many stars you put in for your search. I usually put in how many stars I need for how wide a search that I want. The more stars the more exact the search. I often get matches, especially on two stars that are way off of what I am looking for. This helps when the transcriptions aren't right or even when the original writing on the census isn't what I thought it would be. For example I couldn't find a GGGrandfather on Sp, but found him on Ancestry. He first name was listed as Jno instead of John. What I do in the case where I think I have a match but the info isn't exact, I then take it to SP to check it out. It usually works ok.

I notice that the more exact names come up in the first page, or even the second page. I haven't noticed anything different today or yesterday.

Regards

Sheila

[SarahND]

Hi Sheila,
It must be a problem only with "exact searches" then. This is what I always use, and have been using almost daily for the past 7 years so I know something is suddenly different from usual. For broad searches I normally use soundex on the last name and only add one piece of information at a time if I need to narrow it down. Unfortunately, with the newer indexes generated by OCR, the place names aren't predictable any more, so I use more wildcards (although ancestry doesn't allow you much flexibility with those ) The whole idea of an exact search is so that you don't get all those "almost" fits that you don't control for. Ah well, I hope they'll clear it up soon, as it is making my searches much more time-consuming and I'm supposed to be doing something else now
Regards,
Sarah

[sheilajim]

Hi Sarah

Just think of it as one of the JOYs of Genealogical Research.

Sheila