Webflow Search: How to deal with accented characters?

Design help General
1

Hi,

I have just realized that the Webflow Site Search doesn’t treat accented characters (a, á, à) as common variants. Unlike Google for example, Webflow search engine does not seem to take the non-accented variants into consideration, and so the results are very much restricted (e.g., searching for “mexico” will not find “méxico”).

This doesn’t seem to be a standard way… Am I wrong? And would anyone have an idea how to deal with that? :slightly_smiling_face:

Many thanks!

Here is my site Read-Only: LINK
(how to share your site Read-Only link)

1 Like
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Hi,

I actually had to keep this in mind when developing one particular website.

The solution i came up with was to create a new text field in the CMS collection, where i would add the word variants.

Like for example, if users can’t find anything when they type out “méxico” in your search field, then:

  • Go to your CMS collection.
  • Create a new plain text field. (Call it “Variants” or something like that)
  • Look for your “México” CMS item.
  • Scroll down to the newly created plain text field.
  • Add the different variants. (Eg: Mexico)
  • Try searching on your live website. (Keep in mind the search indexing restrictions)

This should make it so that if users search for méxico or mexico, they will get the proper results.
Cheers.

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Thanks, Kimmy!
Yes, I could imagine doing this for a few keywords, but for a content of articles or similar, I discarded this option as not really doable… :face_with_head_bandage: :grinning:

In anyone’s experience, would any alternative third party solution for Webflow work better in this respect, please?

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Also looking for support for accented characters.

This is essential for international sites with thousands of pages.