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.