Tricky. I can see both sides of this; I want to search for "Harry Potter" and see "harry potter" results as well, but I also would like a difference between meatloaf (food) and Meatloaf (band).
Then there's language issues: German requires some capitalised words. I'm not a linguist, but I'm pretty sure German isn't the only language where capitalisation is used to convey a lot more meaning than in English.
It might be the best compromise to recognise case, and make this another option: if you're searching for [Tag X] have the system suggest "do you also want to search for [tag x]?" Or possibly leave tag merging on by default, and have a ticky for "search for this exact case" if you want to search for only lower case, upper case, sentence case, or capitalised word(s). I think it's more likely that most English-language users won't care about case, except in special circumstances, but the option to be specific would cover those occasions.
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Date: 3 Oct 2011 04:37 am (UTC)Then there's language issues: German requires some capitalised words. I'm not a linguist, but I'm pretty sure German isn't the only language where capitalisation is used to convey a lot more meaning than in English.
It might be the best compromise to recognise case, and make this another option: if you're searching for [Tag X] have the system suggest "do you also want to search for [tag x]?" Or possibly leave tag merging on by default, and have a ticky for "search for this exact case" if you want to search for only lower case, upper case, sentence case, or capitalised word(s). I think it's more likely that most English-language users won't care about case, except in special circumstances, but the option to be specific would cover those occasions.