Instant Discoveries™ now available for all MyHeritage users!

We’re delighted to announce that Instant Discoveries™ are now available for all MyHeritage users. Launched in December 2014, Instant Discoveries™ is a unique experience for discovering family history information and applying it to one’s tree on MyHeritage with ease. Initially we released this experience only for new users – newcomers to family history – to make it easier for them to embark on their family history journey. By signing up at MyHeritage and entering some basic information about immediate family members, new users discovered ancestors, relatives and never-seen-before photos in just a few seconds. Following the successful launch we took Instant Discoveries™ to the streets of New York and demonstrated it to passers-by. It was incredible to see their emotional reactions.

As of this week, we’ve taken this breakthrough technology to the next level, by providing the Instant Discoveries™ experience to all users of MyHeritage, enabling multiple individuals and photos to be added to existing family trees in just a few clicks.

How does it work?

An Instant Discovery™ is a “package” of family history information that you can apply in one click. If an individual in your family tree connects to a branch in another family tree, you’ll be alerted about this and can then choose to add everyone in that branch (up to 40-50 people) to your tree, who is not already there, in one go, rather than manually add people one by one, and amend the data piece by piece.

Every Instant Discovery™ is based on a match, which is found by our Smart Matching™ technology, and we filter out incorrect matches automatically. Instant Discoveries™ complement Smart Matches™ in how the information is applied to the user’s tree. With Smart Matches™, information is added to the tree one fact at a time, one person at a time, manually. With Instant Discoveries™ an entire branch can be copied in a single click, along with all facts, events and photos, and source citations are automatically created in the target tree to document exactly where the data came from. To protect the privacy of other users, Instant Discoveries™ never bring information on living people.

We’ve already processed millions of family trees on MyHeritage for Discoveries out of the 28 million existing trees added by our users, and found that more than 50% of the trees will enjoy one or more Discoveries! The success rate increases as your tree grows (for example, a tree with 100 individuals will enjoy at least one Discovery almost always, and often many more). Even if your tree isn’t growing, the success rate will still increase each day as MyHeritage adds millions of records and profiles every day, collecting more data to compare against your tree.

World map of Discoveries

MyHeritage users around the world have already begun enjoying Discoveries and adding them to their trees. To get a feel for the great things people are discovering, we’ve created a fun interactive map, showing the users making Discoveries on MyHeritage around the world, almost in real-time. Click the image below to view the interactive map.

World map of Discoveries - click to view the interactive map now!

Notifications and the Discovery Hub™

MyHeritage users will soon receive email notifications about Instant Discoveries™. About once a week, users will be informed about the best Discovery we’ve found for them. Additionally, all Discoveries are accessible as of this week through our newly released Discovery Hub™. This new and easy-to-use section in family sites on MyHeritage, which is as innovative as the technology behind it, allows beginners and advanced genealogists alike to automate long manual processes and add new information in a few simple steps, using a beautiful and animated set of screens.

The new Discovery Hub™

In the coming few months, the Discovery Hub™ will evolve and pool all Instant Discoveries, Smart Matches and Record Matches in one place with easy-to-use functionality and new features, that are more than a year in the making, providing a full, rich platform for users to discover their family history using our technologies.

Getting Started with Instant Discoveries™

All pages on MyHeritage family sites now have a new menu for easier navigation. The menu now sports larger fonts that are easier to follow. A new “Discoveries” tab contains all areas related to family history discoveries such as Smart Matches, Record Matches, and the new Instant Discoveries™ through the Discovery Hub.

To access Instant Discoveries™ click the new “Discoveries” tab on your family site and select “Discovery Hub”.

The new family site navigation

If a Discovery was found for you, click “View Discovery” to view its details. If not, add some more people to your tree so that a new Discovery will be found.

The Discoveries Hub™ page where you can view your best Discoveries

Note that the Discovery Hub shows you the best Discoveries found for you, and you can flip through the top ones if more than one is available, using the arrows provided.

The page also tells you where the Discovery was found. If it was found in another tree, it will tell you who manages it, and their country of residence.

Viewing a Discovery will display the match on which it is based, and you will be asked to confirm whether MyHeritage got it right. Click “Yes” if the person in your tree does seem to you to be the same person in the other tree or record.

Confirming the match upon which the Discovery is based

If you confirmed, you will then see the additional people that can be added to your tree, along with their names, relationship to your match, and their profile photos. Click “Add to my tree” to automatically add all this information directly to your family tree! We call this “Applying” an Instant Discovery™.

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Click "Add to my Tree" to apply the Discovery

Alternatively, click “Reject Discovery” if you are not interested in applying it, or you now think that the match on which the Discovery is based, is incorrect.

When a Discovery is applied, your tree gains all available information about every individual: all names, events, dates, places, etc, and any photos tagged to that individual (including the profile photo).

Growing your tree

After applying a Discovery, you will be taken to your family tree where a message will summarize what has just taken place:

Confirmation of a Discovery applied to family tree

Your tree will be updated, showing you with “NEW” labels all the new people just added to your tree:

Family tree enriched with new information

The convenient “NEW” markers will remain for 15 minutes and will then go away.

You can now explore your tree and click on the new entries to view their profiles and see what info you’ve just gained about each individual. You will also begin receiving Smart Matches and Record Matches for those new entries, as well as additional Instant Discoveries™, so your tree will now expand even faster.

New family tree profile added, now has its own Smart Matches and Record Matches, which lead to additional info

How much does it cost?

All MyHeritage users now have the opportunity to enjoy this feature to make instant family history discoveries. All first Discoveries will be free, with subsequent Discoveries requiring a PremiumPlus subscription. Discoveries will always be found and shown to you for free, but applying them to your tree in one click (after the first few ones given free) is what requires the subscription.

If you already have a PremiumPlus subscription, you’ll be able to apply any number of Instant Discoveries you wish with no limits. Well, almost no limits… Due to technical reasons, Instant Discoveries will initially be available only for family trees having 25,000 or fewer individuals. After applying a Discovery, your tree will change, and hence new Discoveries will need to be recalculated. Once the re-calculation is complete, which may take between a few seconds to 24 hours, MyHeritage will offer you additional Discoveries.

Instant Discoveries™ and Smart Matches™

Instant Discoveries™ do not find information for you that you could not have learned through a Smart Match™. However, applying a Discovery is the new functionality, which is done in one click. This will not add duplicate people to your tree that you already have, even if they are spelled differently. Doing the same process with Smart Matches™ of embellishing your tree based on the incremental information would have required manual addition of people to your tree, one by one, and manual scrutiny of incremental information in other sources to add to your tree. So a single click to apply an Instant Discovery™ can save you hours of labor you would have done manually using Smart Matches™. The latter practice of manual scrutiny and addition is actually the best practice genealogically speaking. It is highly recommended, especially for more experienced genealogists, and it maximizes accuracy, and lets you pick exactly which information you trust to add to your tree and which you’d rather keep out, but it’s often too difficult to follow for amateurs and newcomers to genealogy. So Instant Discoveries™ make it more painless to add new information to the tree. Professional genealogists can still enjoy Instant Discoveries™, for example to add entire branches to their tree from sources they fully trust, while using Smart Matches™ for other needs that require closer scrutiny.

More powerful Instant Discoveries™ are coming soon

The first version released this week finds Discoveries based on Smart Matches™. We will enhance soon it to find Discoveries also based on Record Matches. This means the success rate of this technology will soon grow significantly and MyHeritage users will be able to get Discoveries based on tree originating from Geni and FamilySearch, as well as from census records and other types of records. The experience of using Discoveries will not change despite the fact that we will widen the sources from which Discoveries are made.

Additional enhancements coming up

In the next month or so, we will add another exciting enhancement: available Discoveries will appear as special profile cards right on your online family tree interface, in the appropriate location. For example, if a branch connected to your grandfather, is missing from your family tree but was reliably found by MyHeritage elsewhere, you’ll see a special card next to your grandfather in the family tree. You will be able to add the entire branch to the tree in a few clicks by clicking this special card and going through screens described earlier. For users who won’t like the special cards in their tree, we’re adding a configuration setting to turn them off.

We’re also developing a special preview mode for more experienced users, to allow users to delve deeper into Discoveries, and be more picky to select which pieces of information – on a person-by-person basis – they would like to add to their tree, rather than take the whole Discovery. Before the preview mode is available, and even afterwards, it is extremely important to examine the contents of the Discoveries provided, and make sure that the Discovery is correct and comes from a source you trust, before adding the information to your family tree. This will reduce the perpetuation and duplication of mistakes that making the process so easy can increase, when genealogists are not careful.

We’re truly excited to expand the power of Instant Discoveries™ to all our users. We hope that you will uncover amazing new information about your family history and we invite you to share with us what you discover by exploring our User Success Stories site and submitting your story there.

Kind regards,
MyHeritage Team