For a number of years we’ve been able to search Ancestry.com with “Old Search,” as well as the default search known as “Primary Search.” Most of us haven’t used “Old Search” for years, so we won’t miss it, but there are those who, being comfortable with it, still used the “Old Search” right up until now. The following is from the Ancestry blog. See the blog for the full article.
Last week we said a fond farewell to the “Old Search” functionality on the site. Over the years, we have been maintaining two separate search experiences – “Old Search” and “Primary Search.”
With offering two search experiences, it has limited the resources we could use to make improvements, and also increased the complexity of every improvement we tried to make on the site.
Specifically, the technology powering the “Old Search” functionality is fragile, as much of it is no longer supported, and it can no longer scale to meet the needs of the growing use of Ancestry across mobile devices, operating systems and browsers.
So we’ve consolidated the two systems in order to address customer requests faster and allow us to direct more investment into other areas like adding more record collections and correcting transcriptions on existing collections. Additionally, this consolidated search brings forward and improves the best features of both search experiences.
Many of the features enjoyed in the “Old Search” functionality are now available in the primary search experience, such as searching exact, searching only historical records and more. This Knowledge Base article explains how to get at these features in the primary experience.
I am extremely disappointed to see “Old Search” is gone! It is just as frustrating now do complete a search as it is on Family Search. They “offer” too many possible connections! And assmue to know what I want.
Perhaps, they might reconsider if we all withdrawn our memberships!!!
I am seriously considering not wasting my money to be frustrated.