Mailing List Archive: google and umlauts

Kurt Jansson wrote:

> Google doesn't seem to like our umlauts in page titles. Try
> http://www.google.de/search?q=%C3%84nderungen+site%3Ade.wikipedia.com&hl=de&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8
>
> Google says "Ungültige Seite Letzte_Ã„nderungen. " (which means "invalid
> page Recent_Changes").

It works fine for me. Google gives me a list of 1610 hits, and only
the first hit has the title "Ungültige Seite...". This is because it
points to the URL
http://de.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?Letzte_%C3%84nderungen
for which Wikipedia will return a page having exactly that title.
This is explained by the old UseModWiki software's lack of support for
UTF-8. If the URL is changed from UTF-8 (%C3%84) to ISO 8859-1 (%C4),
the correct page is returned,
http://de.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?Letzte_%C4nderungen

This is not Google's fault. Some webpage somewhere has a link to
the wrong URL, and Google has indexed the page that Wikipedia returns
for that URL. Neither the old nor the new Wiki software return 404
errors for pages that don't exist.

--
Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik
Teknikringen 1e, SE-583 30 Linuxköping, Sweden
tel +46-70-7891609
http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/