Making safe file names

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, 08 May 2013 20:16:25 -0400, Roy Smith wrote:

> Yup.  At Songza, we deal with this crap every day.  It usually bites us
> the worst when trying to do keyword searches.  When somebody types in
> "Blue Oyster Cult", they really mean "Blue Oyster Cult", 

Surely they really mean Blue Öyster Cult.


> and our search
> results need to reflect that.  Likewise for Ke$ha, Beyonce, and I don't
> even want to think about the artist formerly known as an unpronounceable
> glyph.

Dropped or incorrect accents are no different from any other misspelling, 
and good search engines (whether online or in a desktop application) 
should be able to deal with a tolerable number of misspellings.

Googling for "Blue Oyster Cult" brings up four of the top ten hits 
spelled correctly with the accent, "Blue Öyster Cult". Even misspelled as 
"blew oytser cult", Google does the right thing.

Even Bing manages to find Ke$ha's wikipedia page, her official website, 
youtube channel, facebook and myspace pages from the misspelling "kehsha".



> Pro-tip, guys.  If you want to form a band, and expect people to be able
> to find your stuff in a search engine some day, don't play cute with
> your name.

Googling for "the the" (including quotes) brings up 145 million hits, 
nine of the first ten hits being relevant to the band. 

On the other hand, I wouldn't want to be in a band called "The Beetles".


-- 
Steven