GenealogyBnk adds “Was this a good match” question.
Apparently GenealogyBank.com wants user feedback. The “Was this a good match?” question was not on the site the last time I checked. I suppose this is done to assist in ranking search results which the site apparently does as well.
I would rather have the ability to easily browse issues of newspapers in their collection and to “mark” search results that I have already seen.
I’m not certain I need to have the sort order of my search results changed based upon what someone else thought.
2 Responses
I, too, would like the capability of browsing the newspapers in the GenealogyBank collection. Last week I searched for only the surname Fikes in only the state of South Carolina for the time period 1794 to 1854.
GenealogyBank found 29 records in which the following words were highlighted.
takes (article on Intellectual Resoures of London)
Offices (of the newspaper)
Pikes (for sale ad, equipment with a sailing brig)
takes (in a thank you note)
A few kegs (of hog lard in an ad — my favorite)
fixes (in a poem and again in an article)
Camp-fires (in classified ads that appeared repeatedly)
Pipes (in classified ads that appeared repeatedly)
Fiske’s
Wines (in classified ads that appeared repeatedly)
Pikes (in classified ads that appeared repeatedly)
takes (in Lottery notice that appeared repeatedly)
cakes (of water colors)
offices (in a legal/court notice)
In all of the 29 records, there was ONE entry for George Fikes who was serving as a grand jury member in a legal notice. This is probably my guy, but It takes a lot of time to review every “hit” since one must click the link, wait for the page to load, adjust the size to be readable, scroll to the appropriate place on the page, see that the OCR has failed again, close the page, and repeat the exercise for the next “hit”.
While I know there is good information to be found in newspapers, GenealogyBank has repeatedly disappointed me. Will clicking “No” this was not a good match help? I have my doubts.
I realize that OCR is a little more difficult with newspapers during this era particularly with newspapers whose images are not all that great, but wish they had at least some mechanism by which I could “tag” things that I’ve already seen. That would at least allow me to not get the same incorrect results more than once.
The use of “good or bad” is a little bit problematic as well. The problem is that “good” match is a vague term–there may be matches that someone calls “not good” simply because it’s not the person of interest, even if the name is right.