Ancestry Smart Search: Old Wine, New Bottle?

Last year, Ancestry announced "Smart Search" in beta, intended to be a more intuitive search form with "enhanced logic" for focusing on more relevant results. It has shown up on my family trees and last week, I tried it for several ancestors, some I knew little about and some I know lots about.One of the striking things about Smart Search is the way results are formatted into three main categories: People (basically, family trees), records (mainly historical documents), and photos (user-submitted and records-based). This makes it easy to focus on specific types of search results.While I like the formatting, and the multiple filters (see red arrow above), I don't really see any major improvement compared to "classic search." Above, the top "records" result for my hubby's great-grandpa, Edward George Steiner (1830-1880). Nope, not him. The top photo results using Smart Search were gravestones of this ancestor. Yes, that's him. If I want, I can filter by location, date, and other…