Driven by widespread publicity, overwhelming demand swamped the Church's new FamilySearch Internet Genealogy Service, www.familysearch.org, in the days following its official launch at a news conference May 24 that featured President Gordon B. Hinckley.
By June 1, demand had leveled off to about 30 million "hits" a day, but according to a report compiled for the Church Public Affairs Department, the rate was estimated about 60 million a day by the afternoon of the day of the official launch. With a further boost from publicity in national news outlets, the demand increased to an estimated 100 million hits the next day, making it one of the most popular sites on the Internet.A "hit" occurs when an Internet user accesses a computer file, graphic or other piece of information on an Internet site. It takes 20 hits to display all the information on the FamilySearch home page alone, so the number of hits is less than the number of users, but is nevertheless a measure of demand.
The demand, spurred by the extensive news media attention given to the new Internet service, was thought to be indicative of a broad-based interest in family history research.
A report, compiled for the Church Public Affairs Department by Video Monitoring Service of America, showed there were 288 television and 58 radio stories about the service during its first official week of use. Though the monitoring service strives to keep track of major markets, it cannot monitor every U.S. market; thus there could have been dozens more media reports about FamilySearch.
Major network coverage included reports on "NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw," "NBC's Today Show," "World News Tonight with Peter Jennings," "CBS This Morning," "World News This Morning," CNN, "CNN Headline News," "FOX National News," National Public Radio ("All Things Considered"), "Paul Harvey News and Comment" (National-Syndicated Radio), "First Business" (National-Syndicated TV), "ZDTV Network News," and "Business Day Market Wrap" (BNN-Radio).
A tabulation of print-media coverage was being compiled June 2 by Burrelle's clipping service for the Public Affairs Department. It showed coverage of FamilySearch in New York Times, Time Magazine, U.S. News and World Report, Houston Chronicle, USA Today, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Times and many other major publications.
The Associated Press wire service coverage was carried by many newspapers, including a photograph of President Hinckley and Elder D. Todd Christofferson of the Presidency of the Seventy.
Overseas, the new service was reported on the BBC's "USA Direct" program and was expected to run on various BBC networks over a number of days.
The site, which is free of charge, had been built to handle 25 million hits a day, or five times the load experienced on an average day during the eight-week test period that began April 1. It was reconfigured on the day it was launched to handle the additional load.
Because of the phenomenal use, many users experienced delays or difficulties logging on to the site. Randy Bryson, director of the service, said Church technicians worked closely with site host IBM and LavaStorm, developers of the system, to spread the load.
"We've rarely seen anything like this with a site launch on the Internet," Brother Bryson said. "We and our technology partners are doing everything possible to help people have a good experience when logging on to this site."