Just an update -
Some work was done over the last few months that appeared to have altered how searching worked. I have corresponded with irishgenealogy.ie for some help and explained what was working before.
The implementers have been experimenting with a limit on wildcard expansion. At the moment I think the limit is removed. They may put it on again.
In my prior posting about searching I mentioned I was using strings like:
(A or B or C or D).
The parentheses are now not necessary. In fact, the person I corresponded with was not even aware that ever worked!
Something like this will work, and will return back people listed as Pat, Patrick, Patritius, etc.
First Name: Ptk or Pat
Last Name: Sullivan
It does not look like case matters (i.e., whether you enter "or" "OR"). Moreover, you can omit the OR and just list:
First Name: Ptk Pat
And you should get the same result.
If you enter:
First Name: Mary AND Anne
You will get women named Mary Anne. Omitting the AND would get you women named Mary OR Anne.
There is a name matching equivalence table built into their search mechanism that implements something very much what I had listed before.
http://www.corkgen.org/publicgenealogy/cork/churchrecs/abbre...
Only my version was putting parentheses around the search things, which aren't necessary. And it isn't necessary to put in all those forms.
This will work:
First Name: Hum* Um*
Last Name: Leary
I do have an outstanding question submitted to irishgenealogy.ie on why I occasionally get back a strange result that has nothing to do with my query.
And sometimes somebody I know is there does not turn up in the result of a broad query, maybe because something is not in the underlying equivalence table.
So it pays to ask irishgenealogy.ie and explain exactly what you entered and how exactly you entered it. If you are using an unusual form for a name it might not be in their name matching table so maybe they will add it.
Conversely you may not be finding somebody because the name is listed in an unusual form that is not in the matching table. (This does not fix indexing errors though, which is another problem entirely.)