Merge Search results for different UK/ US spellings

I was adding books to the rather large Liaden series last night and was having difficulty finding titles with words like 'honour' or 'favour' when I searched for them or tried to add them via Relationships - until I removed the 'u' and changed them to 'honor' or 'favour favor' (and, you see, my spellcheck has automatically added back the 'u').

I would have thought that LT would automatically include words which are traditionally and consistently spelled differently in a search; in fact I'm sure that it used to. I think this needs to be addressed because it means that books may not be found when searched for even though they are listed on LT, just because the searcher automatically (but correctly) spells a word differently in their country. I'm sure, on past searches, that works with different spellings have shown up in the results. Is this a new change?

I suspect that the difference is whether or no both spellings have been entered for the work.

>2 MarthaJeanne: That makes sense though I still think we need to get Search tweaked so it'll find books with either spelling, rather than go through each listing and put in additional spellings.

Honestly if I search for something with English spelling I don't want the results mixed up with additional American results. Colour should give me different results to color.

>4 Aquila: Honestly if I search for something with English spelling I don't want the results mixed up with additional American results.
Or with results from any of the other languages on LT that happen to have words with similar spellings as your target English word. E.g. colur (Welsh) = makeup, colar (Portuguese) = glue.

Colour should give me different results to color.
Agreed.

>5 Cynfelyn: Now that would be silly. Which is why I specified 'words which are traditionally and consistently spelled differently'.

>6 humouress: So who's going to create those lists of traditionally and consistently differently spelled words, for British and US English, Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese and Traditional and Simplified Chinese for starters?

LT is not a monolingual English website.

German also has spelling inconsistancies.

>8 MarthaJeanne:
The ß/ss reform happened just when I was starting with German (the 1995/1996 academic year was the first year (of 4) when I was taught German). I know that there were a lot of other changes but this was the one that tripped me the most. Talk about confusing :)

Ah; I was assuming that things like search engines (Google etc?) automatically recognise alternative spellings so it would be reasonably easy to implement.

I'm sure Google does recognize alternative spellings but they have a hell of a lot more horsepower

Google volunteers more "thinking" and "correction" in its searches than I would like LT to do.

I have enough frustrations when a search on LT for a singular word, in double quotes, brings up the plural form. It’s a safe bet that most choices will bother someone.

There are methods in the search syntax to search for two variant spellings.

If you are trying to find your own books, you could include the alternate spelling in a comment, even a private comment. It could be part of alternate titles in common knowledge but think carefully since this affects everyone.

James

It should only be in alternate titles if it has axtually been published with that title.