The behavior for auto survey has evolved from GC2, it seems.  First off, it doesn't seem like survey ships can magically see into the fog and find anomalies.  I approve of this change, myself.  Therefore, if there are no anomalies yet exposed, the survey ship seems to default to auto explore behavior.  Also, the survey ships will avoid ship graveyards as long as there are safer anomalies to explore, regardless of whether the survey ship is well armed or well escorted.  The ship will ignore nearby ship graveyards to accomplish this.  If there are no safe anomalies exposed, the auto survey will then start investigating ship graveyards.  Be careful about this if you have undefended auto survey ships.  They will try attacking the pirates in a brave but foolish persistence.  If you enter an area that has been explored by the AI for a while you will often find there is mostly nothing but ship graveyards left.  The AI factions have been snatching up all the easy pickings.

As far as I can tell, the devs see this as sufficient auto survey behavior to eventually cover all anomalies. If you need something more efficient, you are going to have to drive your survey ships manually.   I am not sure you are going to get more complex auto survey behavior any time soon.  Therefore, I usually have a couple ships on auto survey and a couple I am driving about to catch the ship graveyards manually.  I am very doubtful you will get awareness of how well armed or escorted the survey ship is.  For one thing, that then brings up the subjective decision/analysis of how much is armed enough in any given situation, which is a lot to consider and process in what should be a simple, cheap explore-and-grab search algorithm. 

Thanks for asking my question is least for the beginning of the game it is more efficient to manually survey. Just needed to make sure of the change it is at least more realistic shame on me for exploiting this. It was also a great way to explore the map. Now you confused my idea for auto survey as far as pirates are concerned. I wanted two separate ones. I'm actually figuring out what ships are what not the computer. I'm pretty sure that I can figure out which survey ships are armed or not. One auto survey option check for pirates is what they have now I would set for most other survey ships. The other auto survey would be missing the algorithm to check for pirates. A little, but not much more programming to make this class. No figuring out which survey that is my job to select which one. One for the flagship, and any armed survey ships I make which I would have to select. The other is the one they have which is for most survey ships which is a separate option which I have to select. I would not the computer would have to figure out which one there would be to selections. Both would be used.