I have been using Ancestry for a long-ish time now (since 2016), but my subscription just ended.
My subs last year were Ancestry + BNA, which is quite expensive. I am considering taking out a year of "Pro" with FindMyPast, which gives me records and the BNA in one go, which will save me a good deal of money. FindMyPast also has a some relevant PRs that Ancestry doesn't.
But, in my previous encounters with FindMyPast, its searching has compared very unfavourably with Ancestry's. FindMyPast seems to have a lowest common denominator approach - if you search a set of Records, you can only search on fields that they all have. This means that you cannot search via place of birth in "Census" presumably because the 1841 census doesn't really have it.
If you search on a single census (e.g. 1871) you get a richer search offering. But you can't readily search via place of birth in the whole set of 1851-1911.
I REALLY like the ability in Ancestry to tell the search engine everything you know about a person, and for it to find ALL the records, ranked (not always well) in order of match-goodness. This has quite often in the past popped up "hits" in records I didn't even know the existence of (and would hence never have searched explicitly).
I also very much like Ancestry's offering up of "other records" when you select a "base record".
So - is Ancestry's searching genuinely easier to use than FMPs, or am I just (very) used to it?
Are there hints and tricks to using FindMyPast's searching that I am missing?
BugBear