"Gmail Genmail" <genmailnz@gmail.com> wrote in message news:mailman.0.1372667307.5878.genbrit@rootsweb.com... > > -----Original Message----- > From: genbrit-bounces@rootsweb.com [mailto:genbrit-bounces@rootsweb.com] > On > Behalf Of MB > Sent: Sunday, 30 June 2013 05:24 > To: genbrit@rootsweb.com > Subject: Re: Ancestry Old Search > > On 29/06/2013 08:46, John Hill wrote: >> But surely is there not a point that the way "to achieve the same >> types of results with the current search as in Old Search" requires "a >> great educational video" and "a helpful article", whereas in Old >> Search it was pretty intuitive? > > >>> It seems a lot of messing about instead of being able to do it in a much > simpler way. > >>> I had a discussion with one of their people on the Support Communities. >>> I think I gave an example where I could search on surname and town and > get a match but if I did the same in New Search it did not show any > matches > at all. > >>> Why is it that online sites insist on messing things up against the > wishes of the users. Something similar has happened on Flickr and Google > so > it all the time, making their sites progressively worse. > > Like me "old don't mean dead", and using the old search I have discovered > most of what I wanted to find. That still eluding me is unable to be found > using new search either. Often employing "least is best" gets what one is > seeking. > > Keeping both searches would not appear to be difficult with programming > skills, nor would being able to display the results in new search in a > more > "economic" with line items some 20 or 50 per page as old search does. > Instead I find umpteen pages of results in new search a challenge to my > short attention span. > > Keith Wellington, NZ > I posted earlier in this thread Keith but people may have assumed it was a duplicate of the post I was responding to. In fact, there was a link to a survey in there where the intention to merge the Old/New functionality was expressed. It makes a lot of sense to be able to achieve the same functionality with a single search tool. It would save on maintaining two sets of code and forms for a start. I often find myself performing similar searches in Ancestry (Old & New) and findmypast because different results get thrown up. Hence, there is a good use-case (as they say in software development). You mention programming skills being a necessary for some such merge but I do wonder whether the database indexes might be different too. That would be a sure-fire reason for Ancestry to want to drop the Old search and reduce their overheads. Tony Proctor