General Chat

Bumped up

As an aside ..................

the vast majority of Hot Matches for me are for contacts already in my list, and to whom I supplied the information in the first place :-D

There is no point in hot matches 'cos the chances are that the person you have a hot match with no longer has a live account with GR.
As has been pointed out you can use the Search member trees option which will do the same thing. With a little ingenuity it does not take very long to work out the bones of OP trees using Search.

Thank you all for the info you sent me in updates I receave its other members searching for other names which isnt in my tree

So it seems that updates are run on an irregular basis.

The last 5 dates on my updates are

5 Jun 2016
16 May 2016
26 Jan 2016
1 Jan 2016
5 Nov 2015.

These include the dates when no matches were found

It doesn't matter if you've added new names or not. It either happens, or it doesn't!

If you go back a few years Hot Matches used to take a few hundred names from your tree each month and look for matches with other trees. The match criteria was by name and date. Depending on the size of your tree, of course, this could mean you might get several potential matches reported to you each month.

Most members found this entirely satisfactory and even looked forward to receiving theirs and idling half an hour or so checking them out and when you did find one that looked promising, contacting the other member concerned.

However, on the down side, if the name was a common one, then it was possible for you to receive dozens of suggested matches which even on with a cursory examination, were clearly not related.

For many, myself included, this was not a major problem as part of the fun was going through the suggestions each month and discarding the ones you were not interested in.

There were a minority of vocal 'we know better' members who ridiculed this every month ad nauseum, even suggesting Hot Matches should be renamed 'Not Matches' and so, in order to keep them quiet, GR agreed to introduce place of birth into the match criteria.

This immediately created at least two new problems.

Firstly was the question of how to match place names presented in differing formats. E.g. West Bromwich, Staffordshire, West Brom, W. Brom Staffs - and so on. Whilst the human can readily make the connection to program an routine which attempts to check for every possible combination starts to get complicated.

Secondly, GR soon found out that the increase on processing power required to check all this additional data meant that the process was taking too long to run so the number of names matched each run was drastically reduced to compensate.

So, yes they are working, I have had several this year, but you can go for months with none at all. And, because of the first problem I mentioned, it is possible that the system may miss matches which a human might spot.

Also, but not connected with the change in matching, members who had already made many contacts found that most of the matches they were offered were already known to them.

My last Hot match is dated 29 May 2016 ..... and they occurred irregulaylry before then

29 May 2016

30 Apr 2016

10 Jan 2016

11 Dec 2015

7 Sep 2015


I did hear that GR are now only looking at the first 10 of your names for matching.

Have a look on your home page. To the right you should see a heading My Updates. That would tell you the last time there was a Hotmatch run.

Mines dated 5 Jun 2016. The previous dates don't seem to occur on a monthly basis.

You could always Search All Members trees with the new names, or see if the system has added a star against them on your tree view.

I added about ten new names in my tree and havent receaved any new hot matches have gr finished doing hot matches now