Ancestry.com hints have become completely useless for me, and I have some ideas on how to improve them.
When I started using Ancestry.com nearly a decade ago the hint system was amazing, helping me turn some basic information from my wife’s aunts into a fleshed family tree.
But today, I would estimate that a third of the hints are for tertiary sources that I rarely use, another third are wildly and obviously wrong, and the remaining third are random images or copy/pastes from sites such as find-a-grave.
Moreover, nine of ten hints are for siblings of direct lines (and those siblings’ spouses) that won’t me get through brick walls and that I no longer care about.
In short, maybe one in five hundred hints tells me something new and useful about someone I care about.
Consider Charles Stanford. I know this fellow’s story: my father officiated Charles’ 1968 wedding to Jean O’Neill, my dad’s cousin. My father also delivered Charles’ and Jean’s eulogy after they were murdered by a drunk driver in 1987.
Now look at the hints ancestry.com recently offered about a family story I know.
This one hints that Charles married in 1919 decades before he was born. This one hints that he served in the Marines at the age of two. This one hints he died in Wales even though my profile clearly states he died in Pennsylvania.
Just about every day, Ancestry.com serves up useless hints like these. It’s like panning for gold, washing out pounds of mud in the hopes of finding a dust mote of gold.
Is this mess solvable? Yes. Here’s how.
- Set some basic data rules. If the profile I create sets a birth & death year & place, don’t show me hints for other states and countries, let alone for records before that person was born, or after they died.
- Even better, let me tune hint accuracy just like I can tune when running searches. At a minimum, let do this at the tree level, but I’d love to be able to adjust person by person.
- Let me turn off hints from particular sources. I don’t want to see recommendations for summary genealogies such as North American Family Histories or Sons of the American Revolution. Ever.
- Let me turn off hints person by person, even branch by branch. Most of the people in my tree are siblings and their spouses. Once I land the lineage and story for direct ancestors, I’m not going to learn anything else from siblings, cousins and their spouses. I don’t want to delete those people, but I don’t want to have my research distracted by hints about them.
But Ancestry.com should be able to go beyond those simple UI features. Many companies, including Microsoft, offer powerful, easy-to-configure artificial intelligence services that could really make ancestry.com hints useful.
- Help me with images. Image classification services, including facial recognition ones, could easily be trained to let exclude hints for icons of immigrant ships, DNA, angels, country flags, gravestones and other random stuff that I don’t care about. And by easily, I mean point-and-click artificial intelligence. Click the card above to see a quick demo of this with Azure’s Custom Vision AI service.
- Identify unique story contributions. Ancestry owns Find-a-grave, it can search the web, and it can use commercially available machine-learning services to exclude sources that were just copied from another site, and highlight sources that are unique and specially transcribed.
- Rank the hints, and funnel unlikely hints directly to the “undecided” bucket. Or only notify me in the general user interface if a hint is likely to be a match, while hiding the unlikely hints within the profile.
Of course, I don’t expect to see such improvements. To continue growing, Ancestry.com needs to expand their user base, and that means creating new genealogists. Developing features for users like me who will keep paying regardless doesn’t make much business sense.
Unless Ancestry.com realized that I would pay more for this.