After the last few posts on the new search, I think it’s appropriate to mention that the purpose of all this is not to create the ultimate genealogy search engine.  Others are tackling that beast, and more power to them.  If I wanted to get in on that action, I would have written a search engine that crawls PGV websites and lets users search from their web browser, rather than writing a plug-in for a client application that searches PGV websites one-by-one.  I hope that someone does put up a web server that does that (soon? please?), and that they or someone else provides a plug-in that accesses it so that Genesis can perform a single search instead of many.  But searching the PGV websites one-by-one serves my purpose just fine.

So what is that purpose?  To patch up all the independent genealogical trees out there into one distributed family tree (see the title of this blog, up there at the top of this page).  These improvements to search, particularly the Lucene index I mentioned yesterday, allow Genesis to take a given indiviudal and ask, “Are there any other individuals out there that are similar to this one?”  Using the index, a list of candidates in order of decreasing likelihood can be quickly returned, the most likely of which can be scrutinized in greater detail to find potential matches.  The user then has the ability to confirm, reject, or punt on suggested matches, implicitly forging links between hitherto independent genealogical trees.  These links will be stored directly on participating websites (PGV already provides a mechanism for this), as well as on third-party servers where websites do not provide a mechanism.

And what’s so great about that?  For users navigating participating websites through a web browser, they will see links on individual and family tree pages that lead to additional information and connections on other sites.  For those using Genesis or any other potential application that may come along (whether it be a client application, a website, a mashup, or what-have-you) users will be able to navigate a seamless family tree, with information coming from any number of sites and aggregated according to a user-specified trust policy.  That will be really neat, but when autonomous agents get to work on that network… well, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

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