G1. How does this gold one-step search form differ from your original white one-step search form?

My white one-step search form is based on the search engine provided by the Ellis Island website.  And that search engine has its limitations.  These limitations are discussed on the overview page.

To get around these limitations, we have set up our own alternate search engine.  This gold one-step search form uses our alternate search engine whereas the white one-step search form goes directly to the Ellis Island search engine.  The gold form supports all fields that the white form supports.  Furthermore it supports additional fields such as traveling companion, marital status, exact date of arrival, and precise year of birth.  The white form allows for sounds-like searches on the last name only, whereas the gold form allows for sounds-like searches on the first name, town, and traveling companion as well as the last name.

The gold form allows you to leave out the last name completely if desired.  The white form allows you to leave out the last name too, but in that case it does numerous searches on your behalf and stitches all the results together.  The gold form does it all in one search, making it considerably faster.

The gold form also gives you control over how the results are to be displayed.  You can specify which fields are to appear in the display and how the results are to be ordered.

So the gold one-step form is a more powerful search tool than the white one, and should be the search form of choice.  Only when you fail to find the passenger you are seeking should you then revert to the white search form to try a new perspective on the search.
 

G2. Is it now possible to do a search to find all people who came from my grandparents' little village?

Yes it is!  Just enter the town name on the search form and nothing more.

Although this is theoretically possible form the white form, it would take a much longer time.  That's because of the multiple searches that the white form has to do when you don't specify a last name.
 

G3. I sometimes get a message saying that my search request has been given low priority because I am not accepting cookies.  What is that all about?

When analyzing our performance, we discovered that the server was being overloaded because it was simultaneously working on the identical request that was submitted multiple times.  That occurs when a user submits a time-consuming request and then gets tired of waiting for the results.  So he hits escape and then resubmits the same request.  Although hitting escape aborts the request on the user's browser, it does not stop our server which is  actively working on obtaining the results.  So the server is spending a lot of time performing searches that the user has abandoned, and this degrades the performance for all the other users who are patiently waiting for their results.

To overcome this problem, we decided to tag each user with a cookie.  That way we can determine if a user has submitted a request while we are still in the process of obtaining results for one of his previous requests.  If that happens, we simply abort the previous search on the server.

But some users have cookies disabled because they believe that it might be an invasion of their privacy.  On many websites that is true, but here we are using the cookies to be able to detect this situation that could degrade performance and to allow us to take corrective measures.

We do the following when we get a search request from a user that has cookies disabled.  We check to see if there are any searches in progress from any other user who has cookies disabled.  If so, there is a possibility that it could be the same user.  However we can't be sure, so it would be wrong for us to abort the previous request.  In this case we reject the current request instead, and give a message explaining why we did so.  That is the message that you saw.

See question 119 on the white form's frequently-asked-questions page to find out how to enable cookies.
 

G4.  Are there no more questions?

There are many, but they are similar to the ones asked about the white search form.  So see the white form's frequently-asked-questions page for the answers to more questions.
 

-- Steve Morse