Duplicates merging and deleting in Address Book

I know Apple Address Book has a "Look for Duplicates" option under the Card menu. I have a lot of contacts I'd like to clean up, and am thinking about using this functionality.
Here's the problem:
Many clean up tools are notoriously unintelligent. There are many contacts in my address book, for example, who have the same name, but different email addresses or phone numbers. For some of them, they are genuinely contacts that need to be merged. For others, they are legitimately different people. Whatever tool I use for cleanups has to allow me the opportunity to review what it thinks should be merged or deleted before it does so.
I went to Card > Look for Duplicates in Address Book, and got a window telling me it found "422 duplicate cards and 409 duplicate entries". I'm worried about pushing the Merge button since I have no idea how Address Book conducts this assessment, and whether or not it will give me an opportunity to review its changes when I push the button. Unfortunately, the help file is not very helpful on this.
Can anyone here offer me some insight into how Address Book identifies duplicate cards and entries, and if there's anyway to review its changes before they're made?
(I know I can create a backup of my Address Book before the processing, and restore afterwards if necessary, but I wouldn't know if I'd need to restore unless I could AT LEAST review a list of all 400ish changes it made.)
Dan

If you have not already tried, I would suggest to not use the address book duplicate merge feature. I just tried it doesn't give you the chance to review anything. All goes automatic and it leaves a complete mess. Merging companies with several people together, merging people with the same last name and phone number together, etc. I restored from a backup copy.

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