Stop excluding special chars / punctuation in search

I have the same problem. One of our support portals is in German and hyphens are used extensively in the German language. As things stand, many important search terms cannot be found with the search box in our support portal.

It seems odd to me that this should be a problem, lots of search engines are able to cope with special characters like hyphens, umlauts etc.

Thanks for the acknowledgement. Yes it's totally being lazy on their part as they specifically chose to not write flexible code. It's not 1985 anymore.. We've come to expect search to be forgiving in terms of what we type and to be much smarter. Think of how smart search is with Google and Amazon. It's these little things you never know about until after you've purchased the product.

I hadn't thought of the foreign language part of the problem but it's even more serious for that especially given they claim support for foreign languages. We now know that their "Multiple customer portal languages" feature is incomplete and one-sided. 

Hi Deb, Stefan

Glad to let you know that we are fixing this and in the near future, we will support hyphenated words as well as accented characters / 'umlauts'. Will update this forum when we're ready with the fix. 

Have a great day ahead!

Thanks Arvind, that's excellent news!

Fantastic update. Thank you for listening to these suggestions. Please consider more than just adding two punctuation characters. It's more work to exclude the rest.

Glad to be of help :)

Deb, 

Our fix will not be isolated to the specific characters mentioned on this forum, but will be a broad fix targetted at recognising "accented" characters and common 'special characters'. Hope that helps.

Fantastic news. Thank you for adding this project to your list. It will help a lot of people. We've only been using Freshdesk for 5 months and I've been impressed with how responsive the Support team is with each of my cases. Often times after we purchase a product the Support isn't very good. Buyer's remorse but not the case with Freshdesk. No system is perfect but we appreciate your willingness to make continual improvements.

Excellent news. I just now tried it and it works well. This solves a big problem for us, Thanks to the team for implementing this in such a timely manner.

I do notice that it returns different results which is a potential problem.

Example - searching for "wifi" and "wi-fi" return a different set of articles when the true results should be both sets of articles treating the hyphen as if it didn't exist. In most cases the punctuation should be ignored. The example you show with "in-depth" should return the same case for "indepth." Same holds true for many words like online v. on-line.

Can this enhancement be reviewed by the team?

Thank you for confirming the fix Deborah - glad to be of help!

Also, I see the reasoning behind your suggestion to ignore punctuations (in this case, the hyphen in a hyphenated word), however, that will prove to be a bit tricky for us considering that we also receive requests in favor of the contrary. By not ignoring the punctuations, we cover both sides and consider it to be a good middle ground, so this is not something that we will be able to pick up right away. However, if we see more requests of this nature, we will definitely evaluate optimizations to the functionality. 

There are advantages and disadvantages to searching on punctuation and special characters, and whichever you choose to do someone will be unhappy about it. Therefore, why not provide both options, and let the user decide how they want their search to be done? Allow some sort of syntax for specifying exact matches versus approximate matches. Better yet, an option to do a regular expression search.