A suggestion for classifying matches. Sometimes you cant be 100% sure that is negative or positive due to various facts (you only know the name and children and the other one knows the parents and birthplace). If you can accept 3 matches but have to reject 2 there should be both a green dot as well as a red dot on the "person" in the tree. If you have rejected tham all, only a red one and of course if all are OK let the green one stay. If there are new matches add an "alerting" yellow one!
Well, they've done it. I've now go more smart matches to work on than I have people in my tree. I received an extra 4,480 odd smart matches this morning. Now isn't that priceless? What are these people smoking?
I am quite diligent at trying to do all the smart matching I was receiving until, I began getting snowed under, inundated if you will by these mindless smart matches. There has to be a better system than this for collaberating with others who wish to see if your "Joe Blow" matches his / her "Joe Blow". Right now I have started to work on people with the least number of matches for confirmation / rejection because I am spending altogether too much time triying to do this and ignoring my own work.
If My Heritage knows how many matches you have pending, why don't they find a way to put them in a folder on their site and only send out a small number at a time. Then when they see you are finished, send out another groujp.
As I mentioned in my first rant, I have begun to refuse to even look at matches that have "Private or Prive" stamped in place of spouses, children, parents and sibling. That is basically stupid because most of these people have passed on many years ago and would surely not object to having their name shown. Other than doing a tree match on every one of those individuals so marked, one is playing Russian roulette when they try to identify the individual for confirmation / rejection. I personally refuse to do this as it just takes too much time for too little return.
I have received some positive feed-back on what I am ranting about but "My Heritage" has to get involved and find a solution to this bottle-neck. I'm sure that if they try they can overcome and put out a software update that gives more control to the individual site managers to control their own sites. First step would be to add user control for the privacy settings that would drastically reduce the "private" stamp from being abused.
If a moderator or "My Heritage" support person happens to read any or all of the three rants I have put up on this forum, I would be pleased to discuss this with them further.
I'd be happy to talk about Smart Matches with you.
The first thing I'd like to clarify is that the label <private> lastname is shown by default for living people in the family trees at MyHeritage. We do this to protect the privacy of living members of the family tree, while still allowing those names to get matches so you can get relevant leads about people in your tree.
It's also possible to mark specific individuals as private if you use Family Tree Builder, so you might see some people who made deceased individuals private by choice.
I know that in some circles it's also considered correct to mark people born after 1920 private regardless of whether they are deceased or not and there are other "ways" of protecting information on your family tree.
In regard to Smart Matches, improving the system is one of the first major tasks on our list after the release of Super Search tomorrow. I know one of the biggest problems you have is being innundated with too many matches and we're going to rennovate to make sure you get less, better quality matches.
We definitely appreciate your feedback and I'll be happy to hear your comments.
Two more things to look at before you confirm are, how long has it been since the tree was updated? The longer it's been, the less likely the other person will come and confirm. Another is to notice if the tree is "basic". If it is, the owner can't confirm at all. Just two ways to cut down on your work.
Unfortunately, at this time there is no way to delete Smart Matches from the list of all the suggested matches.
Thank you for your input.
We have received many requests for this feature from our users, and it is something that we are working on at this very moment. A new Smart Matching interface will be released in the very near future offering deletion, collaboration and many other enhancements. Please stay tuned, it's worth waiting for!
Note: if you are using the Family Tree Builder software, you can mark certain matches as confirmed if they are correct, or rejected if they are wrong. To do so, go to the Matches section in the program, and then click any person to see their matches. Select the relevant match or matches, and click on the "Change Status..." button at the top of the page.
Confirming or rejecting matches is recommended as a way to work your way through your Smart Matches and spot new ones that you have not yet handled easily.
If you have found a match and would like to confirm the information, I would reccomend that you request membership from the site in which you have found this match.
Once you are a member you will be able to verify and add the relavent information.
Firstly, does anyone from My Heritage read these posts? If so, do they ever answer or consider the data in them?
The other day I wrote specifically about the blatant, absurd use of the "Private" setting and it's shortfalls to having your matches confirmed or rejected. It very well may not be only the individual who is to blame for this. It may also be too much stringent control by My Heritage software. I have come to the point of refusing to do the "Smart Matches." for many sites and the reason is two-fold.
1. Many sites are using the "Private" setting which shows up in a large percentage of their requested "Smart Matches".
2. There are way too many individuals on many of the sites requested "Smart Matches."
I now have 21,860 smart matches awaiting confirmation / rejection. Many of the sites have re-submitted these and My Heritage sends them through. Of course it's not possible to just delete them and forget them. No, no. They must be dealt with. Some sites have over 100 individuals to be confirmed / rejected while others have well over 300 and some of these are duplicated. This is absurd. I suggest that in the sake of efficiency and of course my own well-being, the Heritage modify it's stringent control of all that is genealogy and give some of the control to the individual site masters.
I would like to see an update of the software that allows the individual site master to set the privacy settings in any number of manners. and
I would like to also see that a limit to the number of "Smart Matches" each site generates limited to say 50 maximum and only to be submitted once in say two months or until the request has been satisfied by the receiving site. There has to be some control because the way it is now, no individual can possibly work through all the smart matches requested of them. Perhaps confirming / rejecting an individual should result in all sites asking for the match on that individual and having the same pertinent data should be confirmed or rejected at once. This would cut down the repetative procedure of doing it for each site that has a request in on that individual.
Any one site should not receive any more than 200 match requests in any given month or have better control of the number they can handle and still have time for their own work.
Does anyone else have these problems??? Is anybody listening ????
Yes, we are listening. And we are in progress on a Smart Matching overhaul.
We've been very busy working on the Super Search, which will be released tomorrow. After that, it's back to normal duties and the Smart Matching developers will continue their work on the improvements to the Smart Matching system.
I'd like to point out that the privacy settings for your family site control who can visit your family site and the privacy settings for your tree are separate from the site privacy settings.
The privacy settings for your tree are located on the Family Tree > Manage Trees page. There you can turn off Smart Matching or control whether or not people are allowed to copy photos, etc.
We also recognize the need for consolidation of your privacy settings and we made the first move by adding the Account link in the upper right hand corner of the screen. This is where you find Account Settings and Site Settings.
In the near future, we'll put all the settings together in a much more convenient and easy to understand fashion.
Your suggestions and comments are recorded and we'll take them into consideration right away.
"Does anyone else have these problems??? Is anybody listening ???? "
YES!
Geoff
DITTO!
Worst is, the ""-sites get our info....
And to add my 5 cents worth
1. Dates also seem to be ignored with Smart Matches JOHN DOE * 1606 --> JOHN DOE *1880 etc
2. Siblings with same names get swapped
MARY DOE * 1606 1607 --> MARY DOE * 1608 1688
MARY DOE * 1608 1688 --> MARY DOE * 1606 1607
Would not be that bad if the real matching sets also appears in the smart matches, but they don´t....
etc etc
Why doesit emerges<private>on verymany "hits" in theSmart-matching?
When I "comparesthree "they are not<private>longer.??Is therean error inthe systemto the MyHeritage??
When you compare the tree, the person you have been matched with will have the information so that you can match them. The other people near them will say private because either the other person has made their tree private, you can tell because it won't let you "visit" the tree when you are comparing. That or the people have been marked as "living" and you won't be able to see them unless you are a member of the tree.
Today the ccompare trees option under smart matches takes forever to load. In fact the last one I tried is now 16 minutes. As I have a family with lots of similar names (especially in the 19th century) the compare trees option is very useful to confirm or reject matches. Baptismal dates dont show as birth dates so there are matches with blank dates.
Dear Kathleen,
Thanks for your post.
Could you please send me in a private message to support@myheritage.com the name of the person on your tree where this problem occurs?
Thanks in advance,
Ilana
It was all compares and just that day. You had just upgraded the software and I think that it was a bug (perhaps caused by the upgrade?) which has now been resolved.
I am getting sick & tired of having 54 (or whatever number) "smart" matches and only 3 are actual matches. Enough already...
Either come up with better matching algorithms (not just matching ONE letter in the first name and ONE letter in the last name!) or allow us to turn the blasted thing off! Also, if a name is rejected one time, it should STAY rejected, even when someone "republishes" their tree...So tired of rejecting the same names over and over every month. Seriously reconsidering my renewal because of the pathetic "matching".
I know, I know...Thanks for the suggestion. I will forward it to the development team for future consideration.
I understand your concerned with the number of smart matches you are recieving when you research your family. It may sometimes be very frustrating to view the same matches over and over again.
As you might know the smart match list is sorted by quality, so you’ll see the best Matches first, but we also show you the other matches below, so that no information will be hidden, and all your research potential will be met.
If you find that a match is wrong you may mark the match as rejected and this will help you manage your matches and this also will help us understand that this should not be regarded as a Match in the future.
If you no longer wish to see Smart Matches™ for a specific person in your tree, sort your matches by people, select the person, and click on ‘View matches’.
You will reach the consensus page for all of the matches for that individual. On the list of all the matches is the ‘Reject all’ option:
Clicking on it will bring up the following window, with the option to ‘Ignore this individual altogether’:
If you would like to ignore the smart feature altogether, we have provided this option as well.
To update these settings for your tree on your family site, go to Family Tree > Smart Matches™.
Sort the matches ‘By family trees’ (this is the default setting). Next to each of your tree names, you will see the setting option, which will take you to the Smart Match™ settings for that specific tree.
To completely disable Smart Matching™ for this tree, un-check ‘enable Smart Matching™’.
Alternatively, to just not allow Photos to be copied through Smart Matches™ for this tree, un-check ‘allow managers of other sites to copy photos of matched individuals’.
Please note that the Smart Match™ settings are per tree, so make sure that you change them for all trees on your site.
Regarding our algorithms, we have recieved many requests to better the matching process and we will keep you updated if there are any new changes being made. Thanks again for your feedback.
