Foreign accents in search text

[NickD]

Hi All

I have a small problem - and wonder if anyone has a suggestion as to how to overcome it.

I sell wine, and some of the wines have foreign accents in their names. One such example is Juliénas - with an e-acute accent. Problem is that if someone searches the site using the search facility, using the name WITHOUT the accented characters (eg Julienas) then actual references to Juliénas are not found, presumably because it fails to find an exact match, the ASCII codes for "e" and "é" being different.

If I use the non-accented text on the site then it looks wrong and anyone who knows the products will think this is a glaring error. So accents there have to be.

Is there any way around this? Ideally the search tool would find all instances of the character with or without accents, perhaps this could be added to the wish-list.

Is there a short-term workaround?

(The same thing also applies to Internet search engines).

Nick

[Jan]

I can recall someone suggesting adding common misspellings to a product description using hidden text in the description to allow search to pick the products up so maybe you could do that - can't find the posting though.

Regards,

[NormanRouxel]

That was me. Try this in the Product Description

!!<<noscript>>!! Comon mispelt wurds !!<</noscript>>!!

The customer will never see these (unless they've JavaScript disabled - and that's probably 0.something %) but Actinics search and Search engines will.

Norman

[NickD]

That seems to work just fine - thanks Norman/Jan.

It would still be nice to see this as a standard feature - one for the wish list, if any wish-list controllers are reading this.

Nick

[NormanRouxel]

Actinic do support this but only in Business. It's a much more sophisticated solution where you can have searchable custom properties.

Norman