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Thursday, February 25, 2016

MyHeritage.com introduces Record Detective II

The MyHeritage.com Record Detective™ II, technology is a major rework of the original Record Detective technology introduced about three years ago. As is expressed by the MyHeritage.com blog post entitled, "Introducing Record Detective II," 
This powerful new technology has yielded a staggering number of 2.2 additional billion matches. Record Detective™ II provides new information and clues to take your family history research to newer heights. It does all this without sacrificing accuracy.
The blog also explains how the older technology worked and what what changed with the introduction of the new version.
Previously, Record Detective™ used transitivity: if record A was matched by person B in a family tree, and person B matched person C in another family tree, and person C matched record D, then records A and D were considered matches and the Record Detective™ pointed from each one of them to the other. This allowed magical discoveries, for example, a birth record could point at a newspaper article about the wedding of the same person! This simulates advanced deductions that previously only a human genealogist could make, as the birth record doesn't even name the person that our protagonist would eventually marry. However, this power came with a limitation: the Record Detective™ was only able to find information when there was at least one family tree profile on MyHeritage matching the record, and the existence of such a profile on MyHeritage isn't guaranteed: about half the historical records on MyHeritage do not have a matching family tree profile yet.
The net effect of this technology is that when you click on and view a Record Match, within a few seconds the program will provide icons indicating that additional Record Detective hints are available. What this essentially means to me is that I will have many more opportunities to find information about my ancestors that before. The blog post has a number of examples of the types of records that could be located and made available by this new technology. You may wish to review the entire post.

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