MyHeritage launches new initiative to connect the world’s family trees!

MyHeritage is pleased to announce an ambitious new project to connect all individuals on the planet via family ties. We call it the Smart Matching Initiative, and it’s based on our Smart Matching™ technology. It’s free, and its goal is to benefit our users.

What is it good for?
Smart Matching™ can help you grow your family tree, find other people related to you and improve your genealogy research.We all know that we are all connected through blood and marriage relations, and Smart Matching™ helps us see that we are closer than we think. We believe that this project will improve ties between individuals and families all other world and are very excited to provide this contribution to society. Now, if you happen to be a cynic who does not buy into these grand ideals, then at minimum, Smart Matching™ will help you discover how you are related to famous or rich people…

How does it work?
Smart Matching™ technology rapidly compares each family tree to hundreds of thousands of other family trees on MyHeritage and determines, using heuristic comparisons backed by genealogical and phonetic research, if there is a correlation between individuals in both trees. Connected family trees eventually form a mesh showing how almost every individual on the planet is related by blood or marriage to almost anyone else.
This technology was pioneered by Pearl Street Software, a genealogy company that MyHeritage has recently merged with. Since the merger, MyHeritage has been further advancing this technology to new peaks in its R&D labs, and has successfully applied it to almost 180 million names in some 150,000 family trees posted on MyHeritage.com by its 17 million registered members. With your help and with the huge numbers of new family trees posted to MyHeritage every day, we hope to map and connect the family trees of the majority of the human population on the planet in the next few years.

Is it really smart?
Smart Matching™ compares dozens of factors, including names, dates and relationships; it handles spelling and phonetic variations, nicknames, ethnic differences, variations in dates, different languages and character sets, and more. As an example, given sufficient additional evidence, it can connect an Alexander in your tree to an Alexandre in a French tree, to an Alex or even Sasha (a common nickname for Alexander) in other trees, and you can configure its settings to manage the balance between the number of matches, and their accuracy. It is powerful enough to do this blindingly fast on many millions of names.

How can I access my Smart Matches?
Smart Matching™ is supported on MyHeritage.com and on Family Tree Builder.
It runs in real time as you add more names to your family tree, and it also runs offline on entire trees from time to time. Results are available on the Smart Matching page in every family site on MyHeritage, and in Family Tree Builder.

PHOTO: Smart Matches displayed on MyHeritage.com (click to enlarge)

PHOTO: Smart Matches displayed side-by-side by Family Tree Builder (click to enlarge)

Click here to get your own Smart Matches.