idea Improve text search function to ignore accented characters and apostrophes in ArcGIS Online Ideas

Improve text search function to ignore accented characters and apostrophes

MappyIan — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 11:55:01 GMT

The text search functions in Map Viewer do not handle accented characters or apostrophes in a way that a member of the public would expect.

We are creating a public facing web app that contains buildings and have enabled the ability to search by building name. However we've hit a problem searching for buildings where the name of the building includes an accented character or apostrophe. Examples below:

Building Name	Likely Search Term
Goat Café	Goat Cafe
Brück	Bruck
Møller	Moller
King's House	Kings House

Searching works fine in the app for all of these examples, providing the user enters the relevant special character (e.g. searching for 'goat café' returns the correct building, but searching for 'goat cafe' does not return the building). The issue is that the general public are more than likely to enter a search term that does not include the accented character or apostrophe, as shown in the 'likely search term' column above.

In an ideal world, the search function in the web map should return the Goat Café feature if a user searches for 'goat café' or 'goat cafe'.

It would be great if this could be improved in a future update to ArcGIS Online. Explaining to users that they have to include accented characters and apostrophes in their search terms is a non-starter.

This idea relates to the following (unanswered) question: https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-online-questions/searching-in-map-viewer-for-accented-characters/m-p/1543233

Re: Improve text search function to ignore accented characters and apostrophes

RussRoberts — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 12:06:16 GMT

This is on our roadmap to have support for setting a search as being accent sensitive or insensitive. It wont be making this fall 2024 update but possibly first release of next year.

Re: Improve text search function to ignore accented characters and apostrophes

MappyIan — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 13:36:16 GMT

That's good to hear you have plans around accents @RussRoberts. Can you confirm if you're plans also include better handling of apostrophes (i.e. ignoring them)?

Re: Improve text search function to ignore accented characters and apostrophes

RussRoberts — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 13:37:50 GMT

Yup this would be part of the stopwords plans we have.

Re: Improve text search function to ignore accented characters and apostrophes

MattCashen — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 21:27:45 GMT

@RussRoberts it would appear that this didn't make it into the first update for this year. Can you confirm that it is at least still on the roadmap?

Re: Improve text search function to ignore accented characters and apostrophes

RussRoberts — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 13:42:59 GMT

Yup this is still in the works