Search fields - with first or surnames with accents.

Question

French names often have accents like "é, ê, ï and others, wich have a basic importance  for pronounciation  purpose as well as historical value for who ever wants to find its origins. Many managers fill profiles with such French names without the proper original spelling, either because they dont know the difference or that they dont know their meaning. French speaking managers do know the difference and try to respect this original spelling.

However, the search fields identifies same names as different if one has the accents and not the other and as a result, one has to search the different forms. This is a problem when searching for specific profiles or doublets. As exemples, try: Geneviève Poulin vs Genevieve Poulin or Hélène Martin vs Helene Martin. There are a lot more.

Would there be a way to override the accents in the "search" fields?

Answer 1

Hi Gaston,

Very good point.

Our old search engine normalized for these, and we do it correctly with surname indexes (i.e. if the accent is in the last name it will properly group the name with others who have the same last name without the accent).

I'll look into this further.

Chris

Comments

Any updates on this? I'm really curious due to a large quantity of Czech profiles are inline to be uploaded.  Czech language is heavy on using diacritical marks. Every female has a mark after the last a of their surname.

Answer 2

Until a proper fix is implemented, my workaround is to use wildcards when practical.

For example, Genevi* Poulin would work fairly well, but H* Martin would probably return way to many false positives.

Comments

I have already tried the wild card way. Not very satisfactory.

Waiting for the upgrade!