Improved Search - International characters

judas · Post by **judas** » Sun Oct 30, 2005 12:34 am

Hi...i know this has been requested several times and its known to be one of MM's "weak" points...searching is not as intuitive or functional as one would like.

I have 2 concrete suggestions that would improve my searches a LOT:

-I am colombian, and have a lot of music in spanish and some more in portuguese and french. all this languages have accents, and so i would like MM to treat accented characters as normal vowels. MM is to delicate IMHO...its demanding too much consistency from me and my spelling abilities...i'd love é to be treated as e and so if I write cancion songs with names canción (correct spelling) would show up.

This might also be the case for english, cause contractions are very used. maybe there shoulod be an option to select similar or exact or something...i dont see the point in differencig dont from don't and can't from cant.

what do you think abit this? international users? people that have songs with characters not included in their keyboards?

2. I know this has an exact definition in computer/boolean operators terminology, just dont know it. anyway, i would like the search on all text fields to not be continuous. by this i mean i can search for beatles jude and it shows me all the songs that have Beatles AND jude in ANY of the text fields, not continously. At the moment MM treats searches as if they were inside " " (in google) so only exact strings are returned.

thanks a lot...and please comment on this two things.

psyXonova · Post by **psyXonova** » Sun Oct 30, 2005 2:55 am

I like both of your suggestions, especially the second one because it will allow us to do advanced searching without opening the advanced search window. Perhaps a "Google like" search logic would be the best.

As for accents, i think this is much easier to implement than your other suggestion and i can undertand how much easier would be for us to search songs that are originated from Brazil, France, etc.

I am Greek, so i am bound to enter the correct spelling if i want to search Greek songs. Greek language has a similar system with accents. Since this is a common problem with greek language i get over this by having all my song in Greekglish (which basically is Greek letter replaced with the appropiate English ones).

As for the characters not in your keyboard, maybe you should check if there is a Spanish keyboard layout that allows you to enter accent characters directly from your keyboard. E.g. I use the Greek Latin (319) keyboard layout and allows me to write ê, é, è etc by just pressing ^ or´or `and then the corresponding letter. That makes writing accents a piece of cake. I am sure that if you try the available for your language keyboard layouts you will find one that will help you enter accents easily.

Regards

judas · Post by **judas** » Sun Oct 30, 2005 3:26 am

psyxonova...thanks a lot for the tip. i now have a spanish keyboard so writing accents is not the problem, the prob. is remembering where they are!! spanish is not that big of a deal, cause accents arent THAT important as they are in, say, portuguese, where the meanings or genre (femenine/masculine) of a word changes because of accetuation. as i'm not a native speaker of portuguese and was never good at spanish, i'd love to just search as you seay for LANGlish text and find the songs, which should be stored with real names (looks nicer!!!!)

yes...i agree with the google like search logic...we use google all they and so the learning curve wouldn't be too steep.

cheers.

Post by **Lowlander** » Sun Oct 30, 2005 9:45 am

I would very much like to see the accent search implemented. Especially as I don't have accents nor special characters like the french garcon.

psyXonova · Post by **psyXonova** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 1:23 pm

Judas, that might help you remember and/or decide which layout is better for you.

Just open this page with explorer, because mozilla doent like the pop up that this site uses

http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/refe ... oards.mspx

judas · Post by **judas** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 9:56 pm

Thanx a lot psy,,..when i said i couldnt remember the accents i meant I couldnt remeber the spelling of the word, as in spanish the meaning almost never changes...still that page is very useful...something like that should come integrated with windows. mmm..microsoft.

and i dont use mozilla...no, nor IE...Opera is the MM of web browsers!!! and the page works great!

trixmoto · Post by **trixmoto** » Tue Nov 01, 2005 6:37 am

I agree that a google-type search logic would be a big improvement.

I also like the idea that don't and dont would be the same when searching. However I think this would only be useful if it was optional (like you said: exact/similar search option)