APG-L Archives

Archiver > APG > 2003-06 > 1055864469


From: "Jerry Fitzpatrick" <>
Subject: RE: [APG] wildcards at Ancestry.com
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 10:41:09 -0500
In-Reply-To: <143.136a38c2.2c208058@aol.com>


To conform to standard regular expression syntax, the asterisk (*) should
denote zero or more characters with no limit. Searches conforming to this
syntax should behave as the Joan(1) indicated.

Unfortunately, Ancestry.com documentation states that their implementation
uses asterisk to mean zero to five characters. As Joan(2) points out, this
may result in unexpected search results.

Ancestry has presumably deviated from the standard use of the asterisk to
reduce the performance overhead of searching and reporting. Unfortunately,
such artificial constraints give misleading results, appear to users as
bugs, and do not really improve performance. Given these results, it's not
surprising that contributors to this list are often critical of computer
applications.

---
Jerry Fitzpatrick
Software Renovation Corporation

http://www.SoftwareRenovation.com


-----Original Message-----
From: [mailto:]
Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2003 9:32 AM
To:
Subject: Re: [APG] wildcards at Ancestry.com

In a message dated 6/17/2003 1:53:37 AM Eastern Standard Time,
writes:

> Yes, there definitely is still a problem with the wildcard searches at
> Ancestry - but what I found and haven't heard from anyone else - is that
if
> you use four letters and a wildcard, rather than three letters and a
> wildcard - you get entirely different results for the search.

Joan-

I'm not saying there is NOT something wrong with the wildcard searches you
checked but without knowing exactly what results you did get it wouldn't be
possible to know for sure. Since the * has a fixed limit as to the number
of
characters it will match (I believe it is zero to five the same as it is for
the
Message Boards). If some results which include DEMP* have more than five
additional characters (or whatever the max is) they would not show up on a
search
of DEM*. Also, another possible factor, I'm not sure about case
sensitivity--but I know on the Message Boards only all lower case searches
are case
insensitive. So a search for Dem* and dem* would not yield the same
results.

Joan


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