You might recall that I’d mentioned the 1940 census indexing project, run in part by familysearch.org. Last week familysearch.org announced that the indexing work had been completed:

Congratulations! 1940 US Census Indexing Complete! – eepurl.com/oeasH

— FamilySearch (@FamilySearch) August 4, 2012

The timing of this announcement is a big deal because the original estimated time frame for completing the indexing was 6 months (or at least by the end 2012). Instead it only took 124 days, very impressive!

What I want to focus on though is the link in that tweet, it goes to http://eepurl.com/oeasH

My first thought was that they have a fairly active blog, so this link must go to a new post at https://familysearch.org/blog/. Not so, instead it goes to a MailChimp page at http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=b0de542dc933cfcb848d187ea&id=c6e095aa92

Great announcement, but it should have be driven to a post at https://familysearch.org/blog/ instead. Why? First and foremost it is about owning your content. This is a big deal that potentially many people will want to link to and share, why would you drive them all to a third party site? Worse yet, what if something happens to MailChimp and that URL stops working? Next, you decrease the likelihood that someone reading the announcement will read through other pages on familysearch.org. There are only two links on that page that go back to familysearch.org and they are part of content, towards the very bottom. None of the navigation or other outside elements link back to familysearch.org.

FamilySearch, this is one of the reasons you have a blog in the first place, a portion of your site where you can make big announcements like this. Since you have comments enabled on the site it is also a place for your users and fans to talk about this achievement. Posting this announcement on your blog would have been better for familysearch.org and it would have been better for your readers and users.

I’ve been using familysearch.org for genealogy research and it has been wonderful to have so much information available for free. And they continue to add more and more information to their search index. It is that second point that I’ve been thinking about lately.

Search only shows me what matches were found today. If their system doesn’t have what I’m looking for today, it might later on. So I go back to run the same search in hopes that new records have been added. I don’t know exactly how often they add new data to their search database, making my results very hit and miss (mostly miss). Clearly there should be a better way.

One option would be to use their person search API (requires an account with their devnet service) to see if new matches show up. Writing a script to do that once every 45 days wouldn’t be terribly difficult. But that would be horribly inefficient, in most cases I’d be making queries that don’t turn up any new data. (after trying the person search API I discovered that it only searches people you have already entered as part of your family tree, not the familysearch.org search index)

A better way would be to have a system that allows me to register a search that is automatically run against copies of new data as it is added to the system. Any matches could then be emailed to me, with links to the full records. Something roughly along the lines of Google Alerts.

I like this idea so much that I’d be willing to build it if they had an API that provided the data updates.

UPDATE ( 24 Feb 2012 )

Here is a perfect example of why this feature is needed. Familysearch.org just added more than one million records to the search index. The only way to determine if it has information that I’ve already looked for is to re-run my previous searches.