Genealogy Chat

What is the point in being sent 100's of supposed hot matches,when all they rely on is the name- ??Yes they will send ones that are the same in every way-but if I have put JOHN SMITH born in LIVRERPOOL,why am I getting every ruddy john Smith from evry town,county,country ,known to man-an absolute idiotic filtering system,that is totally amateurish and time consuming-in amongst the 20 or so pages there may well be a good one,but why should I bother wading through them all ,deleting each one as I go??

I deleted a lot of mine after going through pages of them. then they all came back lol Marion

You delete the John Smiths you just get more thats how it happens for me. I wouldn't mind but as you say year and birthplace not the same who needs that- not me don't even bother anymore unless someone has more than 2 matches even then the person has just entered the name in their tree more than once LOL Zoe

Im dreading my next lot, Ive had 6 pages of Ann Unknowns and now they are working through the alphabet and Ive had 6 pages of Mary Unknowns. I keep writing to them telling them to put the name of the 'hot match' instead of the contact and that would let us delete all the obviously useless ones immediately without the fag of opening each one in hope.

Entirely agree I am the unlucky descendant of two Henry Brown's and various other Browns - all from London and I even get hot matches from Australia! I did complain some time ago asking that at least birthplaces could be matched, no reply. Maybe we ought to bombard the 'contact us' link with comlaints? Sylvie

I think you are being very unfair about a facility that was introduced to try and help looking for possible matches to your tree. You need to think carefully about what you want fixing. At the moment, the Names Matching checks name and date of birth. It is no use just complaining that it is broke, as it aint , it is 'doing what it says on the tin' Just hard luck is your names are Brown, Jones or Smith. If we want to see some improvements and modifications, as I am sure we all do, then we have to make some sensible suggestions to GR as to what these might be. I suppose what a lot of us would like to see is some additional matching such as on place of birth. Unfortunately this is not as easy as it sounds as somehow you have to deal with variations in spelling and formatting. For example, you as a human looking at West Brom, Staffordshire and West Bromwich Staffs are one and the same, but to program a computer to arive at the same conclusion, and all the other millions of different variations that could possible come up, gets rather complicated. So come on - constructive criticism please....!

I must disagree with you re Hot Matches. I've now had about 6 positive contacts come through via this and loads of info - it's great! :-)))

Trying to be constructive: They could block the 'Living' ones for starters.

As I said on the other thread, I find them a waste of time too. I found some very useful contacts searching for names myself, then *** I *** decide whether the date & place of birth are a good match. I have deliberately NOT put my Smiths on my tree, I have enough troubles with my Greens! And matching with ''Unknown'' is a joke. It appears every time someone uploads a new gedcom, ALL the names are regarded as NEW, so I keep getting matches on names I already know about (and have already contacted). As a start I think it would be quite easy to incorporate a facility for you to tick if you don't want to be informed of matches on certain surnames. Then you might be able to get past the Browns once in a while... Another could be to ignore names with no date or place or birth.

I have managed to get rid of some of my hot matches by deleting date of birth. I put it in my notes instead. I think the other way would be to give poor George an unusual first name. I have had a couple of very distantly related contacts through hot matches but no major breakthrough. They could at least match by country and by town which are pretyped. I have one hot match who has entered about twenty members of my family including my mother and grandparents but has not responded to my attempts to contact him.

The feature needs some creative enhancement, a suggestion to make it much more usful would be to allow each member to customize their hot match criteria...ie. you choose whether your hot matchs should be based on a match of 'name only', or 'name and year', or 'name and place'. That way it would help those with people like 'John Smith' in their tree.

I sent a suggestion in to GR a few weeks ago, suggesting that a quick and relatively easy change to the Hot Matches system would be instead of processing each person's rellies in alphabetical order of surname, they are processed in order of rarity of surname, so that you would get matches to the rarest surnames first. GR can calculate the rarity of surnames from how often each surname is found on GR, so should be easy. They said they would consider my idea for future developments... Kate.

I thought this would be a good idea but I have SMITH and JONES in my tree HELP!!!!!!!!! It should just be exact connections Good Luck all with your research

I must admit, I did check my hot matches when it first came out but got very bored very quickly, weeding out all the non matches. I know Hot Matches annoy me now and so I just don't bother with this particular part of the site. Out of curiosity I just checked & I now have 22 pages of hot matches. There just isn't enough hours in the day! If I want to check a particular name, I do it myself.

i like the hot matches. but as yet ive only ever had them beginning with the letter A im waiting for the the rest of the alphabet now lol susie

I too think they are a joke. I had another look last night at my 22 pages of Green and Bell surnames. For the life of me, I cannot see why these matches have to be 'hidden', so you have to Click to see who the supposed match is! And, why do I want George Green, born in 1975, wherever - I dont have a Green born after 1900, and don't want one, either. And deleting them takes you back to page one EVERY TIME - drives me utterly mad. I really don't see that Hot Matches does anything that My Tree Matches doesnt already do - at least that lets you select your possible matches yourself. GR may be very proud of this facility but as far as I am concerned, they could have done something else with their time. Olde Crone

As a luddite, I like the New Names Alert. When it is working properly, and it only just seems to have reappeared after an absence of several months, you get a list of all the new names. This comes in a single list, so is much easier to negociate than 'my tree matches'. Hot matches can prove useful to beginners, but it is doing little more than quicksearch does. Its huge disadvantage is that it may take months to alert you to a particular hot match, by which time that potential cousin may have got bored.

If you don’t want to receive the Hot Matches go into My account and check the box at the bottom of the page. Malcolm.

I like the idea of Hot Matches, but perhaps later GR could tweak it a bit so you could see the names all straight away, then you could just block delete all the dead wood leaving the likely targets. It is a step in the right direction I imagine some poor soul sweated blood trying to help us with the Matches ,so unless you have the expertise to do better - look and learn but please don't knock Thankful that someone is trying, Maurice

Maurice Even I have the expertise to do this better and I know nothing about computers. A simple, four column spreadsheet would do it - first name, second name, date of birth, county of birth. You can 'sort' a spreadsheet into alphabetical order by surname or date or whatever at the touch of a button. I dont think any thought whatsoever has gone into the creation of the much-trumpeted Hot Matches - its just My Tree Matches by another name and a far more complicated and awkward format. Olde Crone