Add this to the list of questions I have about Ancestry.com:
why do they have clearly wrong place names in the drop-down menu for their searches?
I understand that in user “trees” places may entered in such ways as:
- hancock counthy, Illinois, Pope, Arkansas, USA
- hancock counthy, Illinois City, Rock Island, Illinois, USA
- hancock counthy, Illinois, Hyde, South Dakota, USA
But to put these in the drop down menu for searches of their database? Can’t you just include “standard names?” Do we need to have every messed up location someone has entered in their tree included in this list?
Do the programmers at Ancestry.com do any research?
Some days I really wonder.
6 Responses
You’d probably get more reasonable options if you typed ‘Hancock County’ instead of ‘Hancock Counthy’
Oh yes. This was the “dropdown list” that came up after I typed in “Hancock.” These incorrect locations should not have come up on the list of locations to search actual record indexes.
No Michael … entering ‘Hancock’ results in a list of eight places, all of which are Hancock County in various States. Adding a space and ‘Counthy’ results in the phrase “No matches found”. It is not until a comma and ‘illi’ is added that the nonsense list is produced. Sometimes spelling really does matter.
Charlotte-thanks for responding. I guess I must have not entered it in wrong before or else corrected it so fast (my delete key works pretty well, but is just about worn out) that I didn’t notice the wacky spellings. They really should remove those nuttier ones from the database.
Michael
Do the programmers at Ancestry.com do any research?
Obviously they do not. You can tell that by the way the web site operates. They are programmers, not family historians or genealogists. I’ve long quit expecting anything else from them and do all my own work and rarely use drop downs.
You are correct that it’s pretty obvious they don’t. Probably the only time I use the dropdowns on the main page is when I’m on a fishing expedition which is what I was in this case. I was sifting through my DNA results and needed a few quick references to confirm what I thought I knew about an umpteenth cousin.