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Anyway to improve the newspaper search?

Anyway to improve the newspaper search?

Posted: 8 Jul 2014 5:17PM GMT
Classification: Query
The vast majority of search results are incorrect and most often don't contain the person's name at all but rather finds ANY instance of the search terms in the papers.

It would be a vast improvement if it could find "John Shaw" - the name and surname together in the paper, rather than the current method of finding ANY instance of John and ANY instance of Shaw, whether they are placed together or not. Does that make sense?

The current method returns a million false hints and it makes it very hard to sort the relevant entries.

Re: Anyway to improve the newspaper search?

Posted: 8 Jul 2014 6:44PM GMT
Classification: Query
The flaws you mention are inherent in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) indexing. For newspapers arranged in columns there really is no way to train the OCR program to recognize the column arrangement in order to add proximity searches. This can be done with other types of text.

Ancestry.com definitely is not going to undertake manual newspaper-page indexing. The search engine at NewspaperArchive.com, the source of much of the newspaper material on Ancestry.com, is superior, but that site has its own faults.
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