“Good news: we have given all the users who have a subscription to WordVital Records or FamilyLink (the websites we acquired last year), a free data subscription for SuperSearch for the same duration. You are among the users who received this gift from us so you can enjoy Record Matches, for free!”
I have 10 Premium and Premium Plus sites. I tried to view Record Match results data and was directed to a page asking me to pay AGAIN for the data I already have in world Vital Records, which does not expire until Nov 2013.
SO, where is the "free data subscription for SuperSearch" promised above?
How many WVR subscribers are paying twice for what they should have already received per the above email?
So, MyHeritage purchased World Vital Records, using their data to charge subscribers TWICE for the same data?
Fraud! I hope this is an honest mistake and they will correct it soon, but "Look before you leap" Below is the ENTIRE email I received:
Hi Pat,
We're happy to announce the official release of Record Matching, a new technology designed to help you discover your family history.
Record Matching automatically finds matching historical records for your family tree, from our growing collection of billions of records. It can save you time with your research and allow you to make fascinating discoveries.
It can also be a blessing in adding color to your family history - as Record Matching is the first and only service in the world to automatically discover historical newspaper articles about the people in your family tree. It's the stories and pictures in these articles that can shed more light on the actual lives, personalities and achievements of your ancestors.
We hope you'll be delighted by the new discoveries we found for you already.
View your Record Matches here.
Record Matching features
• Automatic - saves you considerable research time
• Systematic - every person in your family trees is compared to every historical record we have
• Accurate - extremely high rate of accuracy, with a special system to reduce false positives
• Massive - covering 4 billion worldwide records - such as birth, marriage and death records, gravestone photos, burial, census, military and immigration records, newspapers, books and other documents
• Polyglotic - good with synonyms, phonetics and international variations
• Flexible - matches can be reviewed by person or collection, filtered, sorted, confirmed or rejected
• Up-to-date - new people you add to your tree, and new data collections that we add, will add new Record Matches automatically
• Effortless - new matches will be emailed to you on a regular basis
You currently have 1273 Record Matches.
Curious to see what we found for you?
View your Record Matches here.
Subscriptions and credits
Record Matches are provided for free as an abbreviated summary. Viewing full records from some data collections is free (e.g. Ellis Island and Find-a-Grave). Viewing other records in full requires a new type of subscription, called a data subscription, which also provides unlimited access to MyHeritage SuperSearch. You can also view specific records by purchasing pay-as-you-go credits.
Good news: we have given all the users who have a subscription to WordVitalRecords or FamilyLink (the websites we acquired last year), a free data subscription for SuperSearch for the same duration. You are among the users who received this gift from us so you can enjoy Record Matches, for free!
For more details about Record Matching and how it can help you with your family history research, along with interesting screenshots, please read our blog post.
Record Matching runs periodically, covering new data collections that we add constantly. So you can expect the number of Record Matches found for you to grow in the near future.
Enjoy,
MyHeritage team
I have the exact same issue. I had and still have an active WVR subscription and I am also unable to access the Record Matching content. It appears that your WVR active user data may not have been gathered for all paid up WVR subscriptions when you went through the process to activate us for Record Matching.
I have the same issue. According to my WVR account, it doesn't expire until Dec 5, 2012. I also received the same email as Pat. However, I am getting asked to sign up for a data subscription when I should already have one.
Esther, I have the same problem. I was told that I would be able to search on the WVR site, not just the supersearch on myheritage, but it is not allowing me to do so. can you rectify this please as it is quite frustrating being told one thing and not being able to do it. i do not want to just search from my heritage, I want to be able to search on world vital records, it should be the same thing.
I am in the same position - unable to search on World Vital Records despite renewing my subscription with MyHeritage and getting subscription to WVR - can you rectify please, Frances Lynch, do you need more details?
Thank you very much for correcting this in a timely manner--after the first reply to my first email, I was not optimistic and it did not seem quite right, so appreciate the correction.
It is a very useful tool and is it site-specific or member-specific as to accessing the record images? No all members on my Premium Plus site can view the images I see--but if I make a match and add to a person, then will they be able to see it also, or only if they have a WVR subscription?
Jeg får meddelse om at min "kvote"er næsten brugt, der er indført 195 personer, jeg har imidlertid slettet ca. halvdelen af dem, men det bliver ikke reguleret, hvorfor ikke? En person som døde i december 2011, skal vi stadig fejre fødselsdag med i maj?
A while ago I took out a data subscription utilising the newly acquired World Vital Records databases. This subscription had to be cancelled due to the many errors that the search engine returned. Now I have been asked to subscribe to SUPERSEARCH at a large discount which appears to use the same if not similar search engine to World Vital Records (it is the same databases being searched I would suggest here).
Unfortunately when I use the Supersearch it returns entries I do not want and did not request. The search engine is flawed to a point it is not viable to utilise it to search on. Irrespective of what you enter for a Place of Birth you end up getting any entry that remotely resembles the name of the person you are trying to find. If I put in the surname of Gillett and first name of Oliver for Place of Birth being Moreton in Marsh, I get searches returned to me where the name is Gillett and first name is Oliver but it is from a 1930's AMERICAN CENSUS which is not what I asked for. Also returned are mostly entries for USA where NO mention of Moreton in Marsh is made.
For a search engine to be beneficial IT HAS TO RETURN ENTRIES BASED ON THE SEARCH REQUEST. This search engine is, as I mentioned earlier flawed in that it fails that objective.
Supersearch should instead be called Superflaw.
WHEN you get a search engine that works correctly I may pay to use it. This one is not one that I will pay for unless it is to use that payment to then utilise the Sale of Goods Act against you for providing a product that IS NOT FIT FOR PURPOSE.
Any comments would be appreciated as to when you will be providing a PROPER search tool.
Thanks for posting your questions about SuperSearch. I'm glad you included the original conversation too. I think it's important for others who may have the same questions you do.
I would even suggest posting the text of the message you wrote so it will be easier for others to read. What do you think?
I'll recap for everyone here:
The original search was for Oliver Gillett, Male, Moreton in Marsh using the Advanced search.
The problem is that too many results and inaccurate results were returned.
Afterward, filters were used to filter first and last name. Again, results were inaccurate, returning first names like Viola Ollie Rose for a first name and Jolet for a last name.
First, I appreciate the fact that you clearly explained exactly what you did to get the results you got. It was very easy for me to follow the steps you took and see the results you got.
I also showed your letter to the developer who is working on ranking results in SuperSearch. And we're going to make sure that the CEO hears what you have to say. I sat now with a QA engineer and we reproduced the search you did to make sure there are no bugs or problems with SuperSearch.
What we found is that the whole issue can easily be remedied by choosing to Match Names Exactly. In the advanced search options, there is a button underneath the first and last name fields you can use to select how strict you want to match names.
When SuperSearch is set to return exact name matches only, the results are dramatically different. You get 75 results back this time.
We elected to do fuzzy searches and not strict searches by default (e.g. if a user got a name misspelled, or a date off by 1 day or 1 year, you still want results, becuase this is the only way to find out about the mistake).
We also RANK results so the most fitting ones are at the top. But this is only the default and a stricter search is also possible. Note that even a strict search does NOT require all fields to match, only key fields like names and dates.
Again, this is because otherwise you might lose great reuslts. RANKING should help so that you do not need to look at 300,000 results, but only at the top few pages (or top few pages per collections that interest you, after drilling into those collections).
And if ranking is not good enough, which we are working hard on improving right now, we'll be glad to hear feedback on it.
Made a search for Wilhelminnie A S Ellmore and information came back from England & Wales GRO showiing Family name of Baunders....this should show Saunders...how to I tell someone to they can change it....thanks
I must ask, what is the purpose of search parameters if in the end it is only going to pull up everything and anything that is unrelated. I
E/ if I put in a last name, 1850 year of birth, and Venezuela place of birth it's pulling up people born in 1893 or whenever, and US places of birth.. all of which were NOT my search parameters. Ancestry tends to do this a lot and it's maddening and a complete waste of time. If Specific parameters are entered, then that is all that should display... maybe at the end of the list it could display "alternate" possible matches, which Ancestry does do.
The SuperSearch works kind of like a Google search in that it returns ALL results but then it shows them to you in order of relevance.
Now, if you're searching for records in Venezuela you will probably not find a lot of information simply for the fact that there just aren't a lot of records from Venezuela in SuperSearch. We are working on bringing in a lot more content from around the world.
The reason for showing seemingly irrelevant results is due to the fact that as records were recorded by hand most of the time, name spellings may have changed, dates might be off, place names might not exist anymore. So when you search we want you to be able to make the decision whether or not a record that has a different birth date is actually the one you were looking for, rather than filtering that result out and lose the opportunity for you to find a record.
This is driving me mad. Also why tell me there is information on my William Morey born Australia 1851 died Australia 1914 when the information found is the passenger list of the Mayflower in America in 1620 ????? I am becoming very frustrated by the timewasting, following a research link to something not even in the same century or hemisphere.
No parameters other than name are being utilised at all.
Can you give me a link to the exact place you see this info? It sounds like something might be wrong there and I'd like to have the team take a look to see if something needs to be fixed.
I agree with Irene. Data subscription appears to be a complete waste of time. Every search returns thousands of results and filters such as date of publication for the newspaper archive do not restrict items from that year, location or indeed anything except name. In addition it's not possible to access results on page 11 onwards, so searching through 3800 results 100 at a time is both panful and impossible ! Very annoyed and about to ask for a refund.
I'm sorry however currently we do not have a report that shows which of the photos was not published. However, I hope that we will be able to add this in the future.
Here are the formats that can be uploaded to the site, so you may be able to locate the photo that has a different format:
.jpg, .jpeg, .jpe, .gif, .png, .bmp, .psd, .tif, and .tiff.
