Geni's search function

I agree with you fully... Improvements are needed in many areas, but many of the "goodies" will never trickle down to those of us who are not "PROs".

Even with my paid account, it is near worthless. I can not use the search tool to something useful with it.

What a relief. I thought it was me.

I agree this is rather a non user friendly program , and I will not pay for membership. I can not even delete a person who does not exist and has been has been added erronously

Private User - try posting in the Help Curator thread or contacting Customer Service. If a curator can do it -- if it's not a private profile inside a family group -- that's easiest.

Mike Stangel@Mike, another search for profile that isn't working for me -
I have found a Martha Kerr (Ball) and want to find out if there are any others perhaps just Martha Kerr or just Martha Ball (although Search should be finding any of these when I put the full name in my understanding)
so I search Martha Ball and there's pages and pages of them so I decide to filter that search and include her year of birth 1695c.
Now surely this should at least show the one profile I KNOW exists for Martha Ball born circa 1695 however the page is completely blank!¬(

Then I thought I'd search by death place USA still blank!(

Surely this can't be right... at least one profile should come up in these searches.

Martha Kerr

Terry I'm not able to reproduce the problem on Martha Kerr (Ball). I searched for Martha Ball, set birth to 1695 (Circa) and I got one result, for Martha Kerr

Hmm, it worked for me too just now.... I guess it could be intermittent. Sorry to bother you.

Sometimes I find that the search comes up blank if the cache is still downloading when you hit search. You have to wait for the page to load up completely. This is a problem for lots of features (invite to project). The buttons on the screen won't work until the page has finished downloading, which can take some time.

It's also possible Terry was searching at a time when we were patching in a new search index. If that's causing long periods of time when search results are bad, I'll see if we can stagger the patching of our search servers to prevent this in the future.

rvk, can you post a link to the profile that you expect it to find?

rvk that profile's country is indexed as "The Netherlands" which is not matching with "Netherlands" -- there are a ton of problems with that, all of which are entirely Geni's fault, but for now you can fix it by editing the profile and using the "edit location details" link to manually correct the country to "Netherlands"

I've already sent an email to our lead engineer on search, for ideas on how to fix this.

I am used now to fill in NL instead of
'Netherlands' or 'the Netherlands' or 'Nederland'.

Is that sufficient and covers it all possibilities of the writing of the name of our country?

L.S. & Private User,

For France I use FR and for Germany DE and hope sincerally that that will attribute to a way GENI can make a database where these —or other, maybe NED, FRA en DEU are better for there are quite a lot of countries in the world— together with different 'local' names are searchable via a kind of AKA-field.

I realise and know by experience it's a hell of a job, but only if we start to be consistent in using the fields and using country-names we can make a start with growing to a -non-english-language-focused approach of geography. It gives very much work, but in some occasions I look also for the geographical notifications and put them in the first field to be able to look in google maps later. For the Netherlands also the postcode is useful in making some kind of order to be able to find the exact place elsewhere.

At this very moment it is fuzzling, the Dutch fields even mentions 'Province' at a field where not the field, but some strange 'Region' information is placed, sometimes one of our islands —worthwile notifiing for your orientation in f.i. the province Zeeland—, sometimes a very modern administration name that only exists for less then 10 years since we had very many changes of governemental-names in Holland. Every time I fill in Amsterdam or Rotterdam I get a awful notification about 'the Governement of ....' and it gives me a lot of energie to delete this nonsense. Every double-information on a profile-page -also in the AboutMe-field- is waste and non-relevant for what you are looking for: a short overview about some-one you like to know about.

Where one of our 12 province-names appears it talks about 'Deelstaat'. We do no know 'Deelstaten' in our country, we do not even know what the word means, it is typical German to use that word.

What we do have in the Netherlands —and a lot of us are very proud to use that origin-information, for it is in many cases also a origin of DIALECT and in that sense a way of practising & pronouncing the national Dutch (ABN: Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands) language— is region-names like Twente, Salland, Achterhoek, Hoeksche Waard, the very many '...etc.'-Polders like Ooy-Polder or the famous Purmer, Schermer, Beemster, Land van Saaftinghe, Rijk van Nijmegen, ....so many you can make a dictionary to find them all and very useful in genealogy.

* for GIS, GPS & GEO in the Netherlands see also: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geografisch_informatiesysteem (sorry, only in Dutch)
* the 12 provinces of NED: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provincies_van_Nederland
* the Polders in Noord-Holland: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorie:Polder_in_Noord-Holland

Can you imagine how many faults new users will bring in? I am not surprised, but also not amused.... -jMu-

Of course Geni has the added problem, if they try to index all the possible place names, besides different names in different languages, place names change over time and this is a history based website. A difficult one to solve I'm sure.

Do we have a full list somewhere of how Geni's search indexes each country? For example, we just learned that Geni uses "Netherlands," not "The Netherlands." I'm curious if we have a proper guide on what to use.

They use the google maps API. There's a website from google that explains it in detail.

Which of course is about the lookup - not their internal search queries, sorry.

Terry Jackson (Switzer) - Private User - Erica Howton
...and ALL others putting Dutch profiles in geni:

PLEASE use ONLY the abbreviation NL in de country-field and for some other European countries: FR for FRANCE - DE for GERMANY -etc.

for the result is appearance of 'Netherlands' on your page when you use the English tool and it gives -later- Geni the chance to give other languages the appearance of:

NIEDERLANDE - PAYS-BAS - the NETHERLANDS - PAÍSES BAJOS - PAÍSES BAIXOS - OLLANDA - NEDERLÄNDERNA - NEDERLANDERNE -Et Cetera....

But .... never ever use HOLLAND for our country-name in an official document like a geni-profile, for that word is only a way of directing to the part of Holland = Houtland = Woodland that nowadays are the provinces Noord-Holland, Zuid-Holland en Zeeland and where in other ages grew quite a lot of nice big trees to make Wooden Shoes to dance and work....

groeten van Jeannette from Holland, Europe
:-) for there are also some 'Holland's elsewhere in the world because of the Dutch-diaspora that started with the famous VOC.

Private User Please understand that whatever automatically comes up when you start typing a location is likely to be what is entered into a profiles' location field. I personally am unlikely to be entering a dutch profile unless it happens to link into a Medieval British tree. I work with so many profiles that I can't promise to remember your request.

Terry Jackson (Switzer) Ofcourse I understand and know, but i was a kind of a request, that's all. Often I also use the automatic pilot, for otherwise it takes so much time, but I hope there will be an solution soon, for we get so many modern names for old places too.

jMu, I believe that Geni have something planned (longterm) for places we just have to be very patient.

Private User, I understand, but it would be good to know in the meantime.

Geni has said that they're working on lots of improvements, so hopefully those will be released soon.

From the boss...
https://www.geni.com/discussions/248123?msg=1556946

It is a link to Mike saying "know that Display Name is not used AT ALL for matches or when searching. Only the individual name fields, plus Also Known As, are used."
Ie, AKA is used in searches.

And in fact that has been my experience, using the Search Box at top of screen - which is what I guess you mean by "quick search"
On the other hand, not sure I have checked since the recent major update. Did that get broken?

Uh, No - I put "Salomon Frank" in the Quick Search Box.
Got a whole bunch, so put "Elisabeth" in Partner in the Sidebar - it pulls him up - so that proves Quick Search - meaning Search from Search Box on Profile Page -- makes use of AKA Field.
BUT - when you use the Sidebar to limit results of the Quick Search -- all or at least some of those Fields do not look at AKA

So - it seems we are not communicating really well by saying Quick Search uses the AKA field - or by saying it does not.

The Quick Search box at the top of the Search one can get to from Research
And the Search Box in upper right on Profile Page
do the same thing - and each is then shown in top of Sidebar in box labelled Quick Search

The rest of the boxes in the Sidebar are details for an Advanced Search - as opposed to the Quick Search.
Or at least, that is how I understand it.

Private User
When you put "Clara Frank" in the Search Box on the Profile Screen, and then narrow down those results by putting Simon in the Sidebar Field for Partner, then the choices you get include Clara Vrank = Clara Abraham Vrank
So there is s very real sense in which Search is using the AKA Field.

Quick Search - as I understand the term -- uses the AKA field.
I think you have clearly demonstrated that the Advanced Search Fields (as I am calling them) do not use the AKA field.

When Mike said in https://www.geni.com/discussions/248123?msg=1556946
"know that Display Name is not used AT ALL for matches or when searching. Only the individual name fields, plus Also Known As, are used."
He was EITHER not referring to the Search matching names in the Advance Detail Fields - OR the fact that the Advance Detail Fields for Search do not use the AKA Field is a Bug.

You seem to miss my point again.