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Family Finder versus DNA Relatives

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This whole page propogates an error: Relative Finder is NOT the name of 23andMe's product. Rather, it is the name of a tool available (at the website) for those who have tested with 23andMe. The confusion is probably in (bad) analogy to the name of the FTDNA product. This needs to be clarified & fixed.

Information here pertaining to FTDNA's product based on the Affy chip is outdated and irrelevant, needs to be updated


I don't have a spreadsheet program that will open the full raw data file, so can't see how many SNPs there are in it currently, and I can't easily extract the X chromosome data by itself to see how many X SNPs are actually reported for either v2 or v3.

Since I can't check it, I have to question the figure given for "Tests 578,320 autosomal DNA SNPs for v2 " -is that really the autosomal SNP count, or might it be the number of SNPs reported for the complete genome including X & Y, and perhaps even mtDNA?

I have not added footnotes (or comments on the discussion tab of the page) showing where the numbers came from, since these did not already exist on this page. (Might want to discuss whether this should be standard practice for this Wiki.)

The page is badly biased in favor of Family Finder, with comments regarding the makeup of FTDNA's combined databases instead of specifically pertaining to the Family Finder database (an unfair and irrelevant comparison), and such handwaving as "Because of this, it is expected that Family Finder will have a better response rate in general and the contacts will be more fruitful," completely ignoring the fact that 23andMe has a vastly larger database, so total numbers of responses (which is the relevant metric) actually tend to be greater there (despite that the RATE is acknowledged to be better at FTDNA). I thought at one time I added some data about that point, but I don't see it there now. Rthrift 19:44, 23 October 2011 (EDT)

I only have version 2 23andMe results and an old version of Excel so I can't check the autosomal SNP count. I managed to copy my X chromosome data into a spreadsheet and the count came out at 13,816 SNPs. I don't know if the 578,320 figure was previously published on the 23andMe website or if it was calculated by extracting data into Excel. I agree that there should be more references for some of the stats cited. I've made a start on adding some references and updating some more of the information. I can't see any history of changes you've made about the database composition, but I hope that the references I've added will help to put everything into context. There's still no published source for the size of the Family Finder database, and there are no published sources for the international composition of the two databases. This is of more relevance to non-US customers. A large database is not of much help if nearly all the customers are in the US and you are in a different country. DebbieKennett 09:17, 24 October 2011 (EDT)