Officer search results are non-deterministic and miss out results

API Issues
#1

I’ve noticed what appears to be an issue when searching for officers, both with the API and the web search. I was wondering whether this is indeed an issue, and if so whether it is a known issue and whether there is a work around.

The issue is that when searching for a given name in the officers search, there are certain officers who will only appear in the search results say 1 in 10 times. Take as an example the well-known UK businessman Richard Branson: Richard Charles Nicholas BRANSON personal appointments - Find and update company information - GOV.UK

If you search for Richard Branson under officers, you will get the result seen below only about 1 in 10 times. The majority of the time however, this result does not appear in the search results. Notably, this result has Sir in the title, and those without Sir in the title do not seem to suffer from this problem. This means it’s obviously quite difficult to find individuals you’re looking for - especially when it often is the individual with honorific titles that are of interest.

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What would people suggest here?

#2

Thank you for taking the time to report this.
We have found the issue and corrected it.
It was to do with older resigned dates affecting the ‘score’ so the match was way down on the order list.

#3

Hi there - the situation seems to be fixed for Richard Branson, but I’m seeing similar problems for other names.

For example: Brian COLLETT personal appointments - Find and update company information - GOV.UK

This individual Brian Collett has 435 total appointments, of which 2 are current. But the individual does not come up at all in the first 1000 results when you search Brian Collett. Could you advise what is going on here?

Thanks so much