Monday, December 13, 2004
The return of case sensitive searching?
Once upon a time, there was a pretty good search engine called AltaVista...
One of the features it offered was case sensitive searching. If the search term you entered contained capital letters, then the only matches you got were those that contained capitals where you put them. This certainly came in useful when searching for product names that also happened to be generic words (consider the difference between Windows and windows, or Word and word). The alternative, of entering a search term using only lower case characters would return matches in any case. This worked well, but has been dropped in subsequent reincarnations of the search engine.
If you read the help for Accoona then it states that this new search engine follows the same case sensitive rules as AV used to. The example they give is searching for NeXT - the operating system. However. this is a lie - a search for NeXT currently returns just the same as a search for next. What a shame - case sensitivity is a feature that it would be great to have back in one of the major search engines.
One of the features it offered was case sensitive searching. If the search term you entered contained capital letters, then the only matches you got were those that contained capitals where you put them. This certainly came in useful when searching for product names that also happened to be generic words (consider the difference between Windows and windows, or Word and word). The alternative, of entering a search term using only lower case characters would return matches in any case. This worked well, but has been dropped in subsequent reincarnations of the search engine.
If you read the help for Accoona then it states that this new search engine follows the same case sensitive rules as AV used to. The example they give is searching for NeXT - the operating system. However. this is a lie - a search for NeXT currently returns just the same as a search for next. What a shame - case sensitivity is a feature that it would be great to have back in one of the major search engines.
# posted by zmarties @ 12/13/2004 01:10:00 am 
