What an offer!

[gardener]

A while ago I took a free trial of World Vital Records and now they keep offering me 25% discount. They claim to have the following matches for my name:
24 results in University of Texas - Cactus Yearbook
23 results in University of Kansas - Jayhawker Yearbook
20 results in University of Michigan - Michiganensian Yearbook
16 results in Stanford University - Quad Yearbook
13 results in University of California - Berkeley Blue and Gold Yearbook

Which is interesting when you consider that my surname came about by hyphenating my grandfather's parents' surnames, and I am as far as I know the only person with that surname now. So I don't think much of their search methods

[MarkCDodd]

Because they have so many different databases their general search will come up with possible matches, not exact ones.

This works exactly the same way as the normal BDM indexes for the UK.

There is a page for particular years that starts and ends with particular surnames. Your name and birth/death/marriage year are alphabetically and chronologically correct for a particular number of pages so they will come up as hits. E.g. If I searched for "This Isnotarealname" who died in 1926 in the normal BDM death index I will get one or more pages for each quarter showing up as a potential hit. It is then up to me to scan those pages manually and see if the death is there. The same with the general search in Vital Records. They suggest possible hits, you check to see of they are correct.

Considering many of their databases have initials only for the forenames, this also increases your chance of hits.

You can open more specific search engines for most of their databases which let you make more precise matches.

I have found World Vital Records to be an excellent research tool and the number of databases they have is astounding.

[gardener]

Hi Mark
I'm not sure that they are picking out results like that - don't year books generally have the actual name in? And the email says "check out the latest search results for the name xxxx", no mention of name ranges. I think it is more likely that their search programme takes my surname and breaks it into two bits, making a first name and surname out of it. Google does it too.
Perhaps I should start a pressure group to demand that the hyphen is recognised?

[MarkCDodd]

I have played around with their search engine quite a lot and it is no better or worse than others.