Pinyin support for web bookmarks search

[shiltian]

Oh hey y’all. Web Bookmarks search is the most frequent feature of Alfred that I use. Since I'm from China, the titles of most of the websites are in Chinese. At present, Alfred cannot search those bookmarks by Pinyin, so it can't give me any clues when I just type a few first characters in Pinyin. It'll be more convenient for Chinese users if Alfred support Chinese search, not only for web bookmarks, but also others, like files, etc. Thanks

[wangyijie]

@tianshilei1992Well I think you can, actually. 

[wangyijie]

@tianshilei1992 And with Chinese characters:

 

[shiltian]

14 hours ago, wangyijie said:

@tianshilei1992 And with Chinese characters:

 

 

Oh, finally, the first reply comes.

 

It doesn't work all the time. Actually, a few of bookmarks can be indexed even without the `bm` prefix, but the result is wrong. For example, there is a bookmark named "反斗限免", which the first Chinese character is "fan" in Pinyin, as the following figure shows:

 

 

However, when I typed `fan` in Alfred, it shows the following result:

[wangyijie]

@tianshilei1992

 

OK, I got it. I've done several experiments and found that there's indeed something wrong with Alfred when it comes to searching bookmarks with Chinese characters.

So the problem is, you can only get the bookmarks you want when you type in the name of the bookmarks IN ORDER. In other words, if you only type in individual characters of its name, you won't get it.

Example: I want to search for the bookmark '图书馆' (library). When I type in '图', '图书', or '图书馆', I always get the bookmark. If I type in '书', or '书馆', I won't get it.

The same thing doesn't happen if I do searches in English.

 

Yeah it's kind of annoying to have such problems.

Edited November 18, 2017 by wangyijie

[windsurfer1980]

On 2017/11/18 at 8:49 PM, wangyijie said:

@tianshilei1992

 

OK, I got it. I've done several experiments and found that there's indeed something wrong with Alfred when it comes to searching bookmarks with Chinese characters.

So the problem is, you can only get the bookmarks you want when you type in the name of the bookmarks IN ORDER. In other words, if you only type in individual characters of its name, you won't get it.

Example: I want to search for the bookmark '图书馆' (library). When I type in '图', '图书', or '图书馆', I always get the bookmark. If I type in '书', or '书馆', I won't get it.

The same thing doesn't happen if I do searches in English.

 

Yeah it's kind of annoying to have such problems.

Eastern Asian languages like Chinese & japanese function in totally different ways from Alphabetic languages. We often see that APPs developed outside China provide really poor support to Chinese text, even they had been properly translated or "localized" (observation by a mandarin linguist). The screen text may appear fine, but when you play around with some of their features, you got chances to be disappointed with language issues... 

 

But good we've now managed to get around with it.  

Edited December 15, 2017 by windsurfer1980

[deanishe]

On 18/11/2017 at 1:49 PM, wangyijie said:

The same thing doesn't happen if I do searches in English.

 

It's because Alfred only matches the start of words, and Alfred's rather Western concept of a "word" is a series of characters that come after whitespace (or are at the start of the text).

 

If you're using Safari, you could try my Safari workflow. It uses "fuzzy" search, so it doesn't care about words. Only that the characters you enter appear in the same order in the bookmark's name.

 

I copy-and-pasted your example into Safari, and it worked for me.

 

1 hour ago, windsurfer1980 said:

The screen text may appear fine, but when you play around with some of their features, you got chances to be disappointed with language issues... 

 

This doesn't only apply to Asian languages. It's an almost inevitable result of developers trying to build an app that works in a language they know nothing about.

 

The more different that language or writing system is to anything they know, the bigger the problems.

Edited December 12, 2017 by deanishe