Search doesn't work with accented letters
Just tried searching the Quebec board for posts on wine bar Bouchonné.
Number of hits when search string is bouchonné: 0
Number of hits when search string is bouchonne: 44
Similar problems with accented letters have been reported in Places and Chow Lists:
http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/561703
http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/540919
http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/554963
The site designers' disdain for accented characters is user-unfriendly (I knew there'd been lots of discussion of Bouchonné and so tried searching for bouchonne; if I hadn't I would have concluded Bouchonné had never been discussed). It's also U.S.-centric (not the first time this criticism has been levelled at Chowhound).
You may consider accents trivial but for people from other cultures -- including other North American cultures -- not recognizing them is tantamount to not recognizing a letter of the alphabet. If your search/places/lists functions didn't recognize the letter W, they would have received priority fixes. Yet the accented letters problem has gone unaddressed for at least a year now.
How hard can it be to change the software to see é, è, ë, ē, ĕ, ė, ę and ě as e? Other search engines do this. Why can't yours?
