Ancestry holds over 65 billion records from more than 80 countries, totaling about 10,000 terabytes. Records cover births, deaths, marriages, census, military, land, immigration, and newspapers, and the company also provides consumer DNA kits. Manual digitization and indexing were costly and slow; digitizing the 1940 census required about nine months and much higher expense. Ancestry developed in-house AI and machine learning, including computer vision, to automate scanning and indexing, significantly reducing time and cost for processing public records. The company is beta testing a new Audio Stories feature to enhance user experiences.
"We've collected over 65 billion records across 80-plus countries,"
"Just to give a scale, that's about 10,000 terabytes of data on our platform that we use to provide discoveries to our users."
"We were trying to figure out an effective and efficient way to digitize content that we acquire from around the world," Thiagarajan said.
"About 15 or 20 years ago, when we digitized the 1940 census, it took us about nine months to do it in a manual way at 10 times the cost," Thiagarajan said.
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