Allan Raymond wrote: > In addition to any technical response from Dave, if we added something like > > "Searching for non-entered surnames across the entire database will produce a > Search too Complex error. > Enter a surname to get results." > > In our "Tip of the Day" would be sufficiently up front? A trifle convoluted, and not quite true. Searches on just an uncommon name (or on a pair of forenames) will often work. I'll put in a new tip of the day though :-) -- Dave Mayall

----- Original Message ----- From: "Dave Mayall" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2001 10:33 AM Subject: Re: Search Too Comples-- An Example > Allan Raymond wrote: > > > In addition to any technical response from Dave, if we added something like > > > > "Searching for non-entered surnames across the entire database will produce a > > Search too Complex error. > > Enter a surname to get results." > > > > In our "Tip of the Day" would be sufficiently up front? > > A trifle convoluted, and not quite true. > > Searches on just an uncommon name (or on a pair of forenames) will often work. > This too complex search problem does seem to throw up some inconsistent objections. And prevents searches that previously used to work. Example surname = White and district= Eastry gives "The maximum limit for search complexity is 2500000 your search has a complexity of 3278070 " Only two criteria. The poorer alternative of specifying the county (Kent) gives a complexity of 3541140. This suggests that there are problems with searching the commonest Surnames in this way. Clearly an undesirable problem to arise. I just checked two other themes Pearce + Wiltshire is OK, although Pearce is a very common Wiltshire surname But Moore + Wilts just fails (complexity 2630430) Peter Norman

On Wed, 18 Jul 2001 16:34:04 +0100, you wrote: >This too complex search problem does seem to throw up some inconsistent >objections. And prevents searches that previously used to work. Whilst the outcome may seem inconsistent, the score is an accurate representation of the "effort" required to carry out the search (as opposed to some arbitrary rules as to what had to be specified as is the case on familysearch.org) >Example surname = White and district= Eastry gives >"The maximum limit for search complexity is 2500000 your search has a >complexity of 3278070 " >Only two criteria. > >The poorer alternative of specifying the county (Kent) gives a complexity of >3541140. Indeed, specifying District/County will help little (if at all) with the score, because the two aren't part of the same index (and there are very good reasons why they aren't part of the same index) >This suggests that there are problems with searching the commonest Surnames >in this way. Clearly an undesirable problem to arise. We can only cater for so many search paths (due to file size limits), and we have to cater for the Name searches first, ahead of speculative "fishing trips" >I just checked two other themes >Pearce + Wiltshire is OK, although Pearce is a very common Wiltshire surname >But Moore + Wilts just fails (complexity 2630430) The complexity isn't governed by the local rarity of the surname, but by the total occurrences nationwide. We *are* constantly refining the indexes (I spent 4 hours today developing a new index structure) to allow more searches to complete, but there *is* a limit to what we can achieve. -- Dave Mayall