My Ancestry - Member Search useless?

I entered several targets, including ALICE RATCHUS, with a marriage

Mardon...

<*snip*>

1938-1942. On clicking the icon to 'View Ancestry members interested
in this person' no fewer than 933 'hits' are displayed. The first few
results are about as wide of the mark as you could get:

Alice M Roodkowsky, Jan Radziszewski, Mary R Ritcheson, John
Yalitopolous Retsas, Esther Rydzewski...

Does anyone else use this facility? Do I have some basic
misunderstanding? Can it really be as useless as it appears?

Steven Gibbs...

singhals...

Yes, I understood that, Steven.

It's as useless as it appears.

Terry Pinnell...

Thanks - relieved to hear it's not just down to me then.

Incredible that it can't even manage to match on surname! At a pinch
it could be used as a Lottery win generator.

Making the reasonable assumption that my email to them last night
wasn't the first they've received on the subject, what am I to
conclude? That it's a technically intractable challenge? That Ancestry
is unresponsive to suggested improvements? Or what?

Steven Gibbs
Bedford

Mardon...

Perhaps you're not familiar with "wild card" searches? If you do an
"exact" search (not soundex) and use wildcards, you can usually get pretty
close to finding name variants. Use a "*" to match up to any six
characters. Use an "?" to match any single character. For example, an
exact search on "Alice" for the first name and "Ractch*" shows an "Alice
Racthin" in Shillington and an "Alice Ratchff" in Marylebone. Searching
for Alice and "Ratc???" finds these same two names. Searching for
"Ratch*s" finds nothing.

Terry Pinnell...

Thanks, but I am very familiar with wild card searching. And I use it
a fair bit on Ancestry. But not with the facility under discussion
here, where it doesn't exist.