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Ancestry.com has launched a new section of its site called Ancestry
Labs, a website similar to FamilySearch
Labs and Google Labs,
where Ancestry.com can test ideas and gather your feedback on them.

You can see a demo of how
Ancestry Labs works here. Leave feedback by using the green Feedback tab on the
left side of the Ancestry Labs site.

“The projects we place in this area are likely to be early prototypes, and although
some of them may make their way into the main Ancestry.com site, some may not,” reads
Ancestry.com’s announcement.

The first idea at Ancestry Labs, called “Person
View,” includes two components: 

• Web Records: This feature searches for your ancestor on the internet, shows
  you basic information (name, date and place) from web pages mentioning your ancestor,
  and links you to those pages. Sites searched include free databases such as the Western
  States Marriage Record Index. In a demo in August, project manager Brian Hansen
  said Ancestry.com is attempting to avoid duplication by not searching the same collections
  that are already included in Ancestry.com databases.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because Ancestry.com offered a similar search in the
maligned Internet Biographical Collection, which was pulled
down shortly after its introduction in August 2007 amid copyright and other concerns.
The difference is that the Internet Biographical Collection actually cached web pages’
content and displayed the results on Ancestry.com, so traffic wasn’t directed to the
site and the content’s creator wasn’t credited. 

Ancestry.com is hoping to avoid the same mistakes with the new Web Records view. “In
providing access to these, it’s very important to us that we are respectful to the
publishers of these websites,” the announcements says. “We will always strive to follow
web industry standards for website crawling permissions … We will put in place processes
to remove the content from our search if the website/content owner requests, with
the goal of doing this as quickly as possible. We will clearly publish how to contact
our team to do this.”

• Person Consolidation: This way of viewing Ancestry.com search results groups
  matches by person, rather than just listing each result. The search algorithm decides
  whether records are for one person, and your results show a person’s name with links
  to categories of records—Ancestry Records, Family Trees (with no living people included)
  and Web Records—for that person. Click one of those links to see more links to view
  each record in that category. The search results also list a person’s family members,
  and you can click these names to see that family member’s records. 

Person View gives you just the first 10 matches to your search. The advantage is that
it Person View simplifies your search results, but the algorithm can make mistakes
by grouping together records for two different people, or displaying one person as
two different people.

Here’s my first PersonView search for Henry Seeger:

And the first match, which consolidates content about Henry Seeger from 15 Ancestry.com
family trees (no Ancestry Records or Web Records were found for this Henry). It lists
people the search engine believes to be in Henry’s family (I’d have to look at each
tree and decide whether I think they’re all really related to Henry). Clicking on
a name, such as Henry’s son Charles, will perform a new search for that person.

Clicking on Henry’s name brings up a timeline of events from those trees, with a little
map showing places mentioned in the trees: 

Links on the right bring up information about each tree and let you save the event
to your tree:

If your matches contain Ancestry Records, the timeline will link to information from
the record (a WWI Draft Registration card, in the case below, was the source for a
February, 1873 birth date): 

Web Record matches bring up similar basic information, with a link to the site that
has the record (you can’t yet save Web Records to your Ancestry tree): 

Click Comments to let us know what you think of Ancestry
Labs and Person View.