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I've subscribed to Ancestry.com for many years. I consider it essential for my research, but it can be extremely frustrating to use, and you really need to know what you are doing in order to evaluate the search results. The best things about it are the quantity of records, the advanced search, and the US Census Images. I use the advanced search for my initial search on each person, tweaking the settings based on who I'm searching for. The fuzzy search is pretty good, but searches often either miss relevant records or return vast numbers of irrelevant records. Also, transcription errors are rife, and I often have to "trick" the search engine into finding people whose names have been mistranscribed. Thank goodness users can now enter alternate names! The search also doesn't do very well at finding some obvious spelling variations -- it's quite hit or miss. (For instance, I had to do separate searches on "Mc Coy" and "McCoy," though I think they may have fixed this by now.) Another problem is that the proliferation of Public Member Trees has resulted in a proliferation of wrong information that is mindlessly copied by other users, and most users don't document their sources. I also hate the way the information in the Public Member Trees is displayed -- very wasteful of screen space, and too much scrolling and clicking is required to see all the relevant info. I also wish they would break down the search categories more. For instance, it should be possible to do a search for all marriage records without having to wade through all birth, christening, marriage, and death records. Sure, specific marriage databases can be searched separately, but if one doesn't know which database to search, it would be a great timesaver to be able to do this through the global advanced search. At least they have finally fixed one of my major complaints -- the advanced image viewer is now Mac compatible, so I don't have to read through an entire newspaper page to find the mention of the person I'm looking for!
In summary, I would recommend Ancestry.com to a friend.
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