Apostrophe vs. quote

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    1. Apr 15, 2008
      mawbid says:

      Data quality may be improved by helping users to use the apostrophe where appropriate (such as in "can't") instead of whatever apostrophe-resembling character they find on their non-US keyboard.

      Earlier today I got no hits when searching for the movie title "Wild Hearts can't be Broken". The movie I expected did exist in Freebase, but wasn't found because the title contained a 'RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK' (U+2019) character where there should have been an 'APOSTROPHE' (U+0027) character. (I've fixed it now.)

      This kind of thing is common and people who aren't particularly interested the fascinating subjects of character encoding and typography can't really be expected to get this right on their own.

      2. evening
        Jul 31, 2008
        evening says:
        Wow, I had no idea that was even a possibility.  thanks for the education.
      3. faye
        Aug 1, 2008
        faye says:

        Hi. The Freebase relevance engine powering search and autocomplete has special handling for characters such as aspostrophe and quote and allows users to find them without those characters. For example, you can find Shakespeare's "Love's Labour's Lost" with "loves labours lost", Edgar Allan Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart" with "telltale heart".

        I will investigate why this does not seem to work with "wild hearts cant be broken". In general though, you can skip punctuations and substitute the English alphabet for accented characters in search, and it should work.


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