Relationship engine question

Hi Wendi,

I'm a little reluctant to get too specific, for two reasons:

1. There's a little bit of "secret sauce" here. "Trade secret" is probably too strong a connotation, but we have created some proprietary technology for path searches that we don't necessarily want to publish publicly;

2. The algorithm has been refined several times, and may change again. So whatever I say now may be different in a month or six months.

That said, here's the general idea: if a profile is relatively close to you, we keep that around at all times and you will see the relationship in real time, every time you visit the profile. The range for this is something akin to your Family Group settings. Otherwise, we check whether we have stored a path from a previous search; if it's less than a week old and still valid, we give you that path and do nothing more. If it's more than a week old, we show it with a "refresh" icon (two circular arrows, similar to a recycle logo) at then end of the description string. If you click the refresh icon or if nothing was previously stored and you click the "How Are You Related?" button, we try several ways to find a path starting with blood relatives and failing that, moving on to inlaw relationships. In each case we can only look so far before the server would exhaust its resources crawling the tree, so it may fail to find a path if someone is connected to you but very distant, especially through many marriages.

Sorry it's a little vague but I hope that helps!

Mike at Geni

Mike StangelYes, it does thanks! I figured it was proprietary, but that there must be some general info somewhere, so thank you for sharing.

I'm finding that sometimes it says I'm connected to a profile, but then when I click the relationship button none is found. I'm guessing that has to do with the limits to prevent the server from burning itself out basically.

Appreciate the response :))

Mike that was a great answer and very much part of what I hoped to evoke from a more focused topic, thank you.

What I can add is some of my observations, as an application user, over the last couple of years.

1. The relationship path technology is one of the most exciting aspects of Geni. I haven't seen anything truly comparable elsewhere. The dynamism of it is "refreshing" (pun intended) - and sometimes frustrating.

2. I can also attest to the constant tweaking and building by the G team over time, and my expectation is this will continue to be a major focus. (?)

Wendi sometimes that message is a bit misleading. It can mean you're connected to the world family tree, and so is this other profile - but you / the other guy may in fact not (yet) have the connecting profiles in place. And sometimes it means there are connecting profiles but the server has maxxed out on its ability to calculate & display. I try not to stress out on that too much because if a relationship is that distant it just means we need to do more tree building ...

Oh yes - the push button tool is beyond cool, and it has totally helped me in tree building, too, by giving me targets. I have a relationship to NAPOLEON, how interesting.

Private User ... one other thing to note: If you "follow a trail" from a profile where Geni already 'knows' the relationship to you -- that is, you click on an 'adjacent' profile link (e.g.: mother, sister, daughter, ...), then Geni will happily "build-out" the path -- no matter how much you "wander" in the process!

Do note, however, that if you tell Geni to 'recalculate' the relationship, it may NOT re-find that same path ... and may fail to find the path at all.

That 'follow-the-bread-crumbs' is nice when you know there is a 'gateway' person that Geni doesn't currently consider in its path-search from your profile.

What I don't understand is how I got a very distant path a couple of months ago, and failed to get it on many other occasions since.
My cynical explanation of it is that Geni wants to ease up on the servers.

On a different matter that fits nicely in this discussion, if I ask Geni to generate a gedcam of my tree, how far do they go MYSELF being the central focus. If they give me the "big tree" or "world tree" 65000000 people, is there a way to restrict it. Finally, do all genealogical websites use a singular (same) gedcam?

Yes, you can restrict it and they just implemented that you can only get up to 10x the number of profiles you have added.

re: GEDCOM export: When you go to the place where you can request a GEDCOM download (http://www.geni.com/gedcom) you will see there are 4 choices: Blood Relatives, Ancestors, Descendants, and Forest (which includes connected inlaw trees). There is also a box where you can specify the number of profiles to put into the file (up to the maximum you are allowed).

re: path
When you noticed a very long path a few months ago, I would venture that you had followed a "trail" of connections to get there ... and Geni's relationship path happily followed right along with you.

However, when you later 'jumped' directly to that profile, Geni had to try to FIND a path ... and it was unable to do so.

Back to your last GEDCOM question: Yes, virtually all genealogy programs and web sites support the GEDCOM format; there are some 'incomplete specifications' in the standard, and thus you may find some minor differences in the 'ambiguous' or 'extensions' to the standard.

Do your statistics more accurately reflect blood relatives than the relationship pathways then?

1) see also discussion: Relationship Path - Needs Training Sometimes:
http://www.geni.com/discussions/101745

2) my web page famous Relatives on Geni - which lists "some" of the Path - and by either clicking on 1 of the names in tha Path OR using the Push feature - may find the Path between You & the desired Person

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~prohel/stories/Fa...

Thanks Peter Rohel (c)