Family History Discovery through Search at Ancestry

Peng Jiang, Yingrui Yang, Gann Bierner, Fengjie Alex Li, Ruhan Wang, Azadeh Moghtaderi

Abstract: At Ancestry, we apply learning to rank algorithms to a new area to assist our customers in better understanding their family history. The foundation of our service is an extensive and unique collection of billions of historical records that we have digitized and indexed. Currently, our content collection includes 20 billion historical records. The record data consists of birth records, death records, marriage records, adoption records, census records, obituary records, among many others types. It is important for us to return relevant records from diversified record types in order to assist our customers to better understand their family history.