New Discoveries Pages and Value Add -- Major Improvements for MyHeritage

MyHeritage.com today announced a major upgrade to their website. The new addition is called Discoveries Pages. Here is a description of the new features. from their blog post entitled, "Introducing the New Discoveries Pages."

We’ve unified all matches and organized them into two main pages: Matches by People and Matches by Source. Now you can look at all matches that were found for a particular individual in your family tree, or all matches found in a particular collection of historical records or matching family tree. Whatever you choose to use, the new pages combine Smart Matches (matches with trees) and Record Matches (matches with records) into the same unified and consistent interface. However, you can still decide to view only Smart Matches or only Record Matches and not both together. 

This is much better than the previous organization, where Smart Matches and Record Matches were entirely separate sections on the website, and you had to look at each one of them separately. The historical reason for that separation was that Smart Matches were developed first and Record Matches were released several years later. Now we’ve gone back and unified the experience of using both.

Here is a screenshot of my own website showing all of the combined matches.

If you look closely, you may see that I have a combined total of 103,396 matches for 5,412 people. You also might guess that I can't really handle that number but have to focus on those people who are currently the focus of my research and sort-of ignore the rest for the time being. You really need to read the entire blog post to understand what a great new innovation these pages really are and how utility they add to the entire website.

If that were not enough, MyHeritage.com has added another incredible feature called Value Added. Here is the description, again from the blog post.

MyHeritage has invented a unique and very useful concept in matching that describes the incremental information that any match can add to your tree. We call this “Value Add.” For example, if an individual in your family tree matches a historical record such as a Social Security Death Index record, and you don’t know the individual’s date of death, but the record has it, the Value Add will include “Death date.” A Value Add factor can be partial. For example, if you know an individual was born in 1928 but the record states the birth date as July 28, 1928, and there is no contradiction, the Value Add factor will be “More complete birth date”. In this manner, we have developed about 15 Value Add criteria, and they are all useful for describing what new and incremental information a match (or set of matches) can bring your tree, that you currently don’t have. A Value Add can even be a new personal photo or a new family member (such as father, mother, sibling, spouse or child) that your family tree lacks. 

Matches are now sorted by the Value Add so that those matches that add the most value are listed first. In the past, matches were sorted by how confident we were that they were correct. We were listing matches that we were very confident about at the top of the list, but typically those matches didn’t provide much new information. If we were certain they were correct, that meant they were matching many fields and information that you already knew. So, in fact, we were listing less-exciting matches at the top of your list. They were correct matches, but less interesting for you! 

The new sorting by Value Add ensures that the matches that can teach you the most – those that are the most exciting – are listed at the top of your matches. This saves you valuable time and allows you to focus your limited time on the matches that are potentially the most valuable. Every match now describes the Value Add as “New information”.

Here is a sample of the Value Added notes on some of my ancestors.

The Value Added part is the "New Information in this match."

Every so often, MyHeritage.com adds a new feature that really changes the way people interact with and benefit from their website. This is one of those times.