Smart Filtering helps focus your search on new information by removing less helpful results. Smart Filtering removes:
- results already saved for this person
- hints you've ignored for this person
- results that almost never offer more discoveries beyond what you already saved
Smart Filtering is only applied when you initiate a person search.
Person searches
A person search automatically copies details you saved to someone in your tree and runs a search based on that information.
There are several ways to run a person search and activate Smart Filtering:
- From a tree, click on the person you want to search and click Search in the card that appears.
- From the profile of someone in your tree, click Search in the top-right corner.
- In a search form, start typing the name of the person you’re searching for. Quick fill suggestions will appear below the name fields. Click on the quick fill suggestion that matches the person you want to search and click Search.
How Smart Filtering removes less useful results
Smart Filtering identifies collections where a single person will almost never appear in more than one record, such as birth records, census reports, and death records.
For example, imagine that you’ve already saved these three records to your tree for Sam Smith:
- New York, Birth Index, 1891–1902
- 1910 United States Federal Census
- U.S., Social Security Death Index, 1935–2014
Smart Filtering will remove all other records from those three collections from your person search for Sam Smith. People are born and die only once, and usually, they’re recorded only once during a census. Because of this, you’re unlikely to make more discoveries in these collections, so the records are removed from your search results.
There are rare circumstances where a census has more than one record for the same person. For example, this can happen if a person is recorded in the census and shortly after, moves to a different residence (sometimes in the same town) and is recorded again at their new residence. In rare scenarios like these, Smart Filtering can exclude a possible match, as it relies on the assumption that only one record match is possible within the census collections. If you’re concerned about a circumstance like this, you can turn Smart Filtering off and back on at any time.
Turning Smart Filtering on and off
When you run a person search from someone who has at least one result attached to them, Smart Filtering is automatically turned on. To turn it off, click Active at the top of your search results and use the toggle switch.
To turn it back on, click Inactive and press the toggle switch.