YA searching on mathematical symbols doesn't work!?

Question

[Reasking, due to poor response. Doesn't anyone care about this? It shouldn't be too hard to get right.]

Searching for symbols within Yahoo!Answers is inconsistent,
here is what you get if you search on various symbols
(some are Alt-codes and some are HTML characters):

Most alt-codes e.g. integral (∫), square-root(√), infinity (∞), (≈) => these all match the word 'and' - useless!?

squared (²) => also matches '2', which makes it useless

Greek letters:
capital Sigma (Σ) => returns both Σ and lower σ , which is meaningless in science (instead of if you were searching for Greek-language, in which case it would be correct).
Similarly θ => θ,Θ
α,β,λ,µ...

Anyone find anything else inconsistent, weird or quirky with any other symbols?

Maybe if we kick up a fuss they might fix this... please contribute...

[Note: if you post an URL in reply, put it in the 'Sources' box]

Northstar - interesting comments

Kaksi - "if we kicked up a fuss it wouldn't help; they cannot fix it!"
Yes they can index these things, they only need to change the encoding used in internal character representation. At the moment, it doesn't even do the ANSI 256-character set, thus my comment on '√'.
Indexing the symbols to the word 'and' is plain silly.

Let alone other encodings (e.g. foreign languages).

"you are lucky to find Greek Σ and σ" because your national MS Office is Greek"
Nonsense - it isn't and no I'm not Greek!
Σ is simply Alt-Numeric-228 ...
http://www.usefulshortcuts.com/alt-codes/maths-alt-codes.asp
... and σ can be copied from the full
"HTML 4.0 Character Set"
http://www.alanwood.net/demos/ent4_frame.html

In maths & science, 'Σ' means summation, whereas 'σ' means standard deviation (or conductivity, or whatever else) - so the two are totally unrelated, in this context. That is not massively complicated to implement.

kaksi - Yes, they could internally represent with Unicode which is a standardized and platform-independent
representation whereas Alt-codes are not. I was simply showing you how to input the range of scientific symbols, to search for. I also gave a link to a full list of HTML encodings.

YA could very easily index with Unicode, and the 2-5 byte length can be compressed away (e.g. Huffman encoding). This is what I'm suggesting, and it's very doable.

PS You're the first person ever to call my avatar Greek, why?

Answer 1

I have found more problems than that. If I type in a search criteria that has more than 10 results, they appear on different pages. However, when I go to the second page, YahooAnswers search function usually forgets what the search is and replaces it with a much broader search. A search for the word "plane" under Science & Mathematics → Mathematics which might have 15 results suddenly is replaced with a search for the word "plane" under all categories with hundreds of results. So searches with more than 10 results are pretty much worthless.

Other times a search doesn't find every instance. Sometimes a result I know about doesn't show up in a search.

There is a lot that needs fixing in the search function of YahooAnswers.

Answer 2

♣ if we kicked up a fuss it wouldn't help; they cannot fix it!
♥ I think they did the most they could to display relevant images of various symbols following MS-Word for various languages including Chinese and Hebrew;
►you are lucky to find Greek Σ and σ because your national MS Office is Greek; I cannot even input them into search engine of my MS Office!
This inconvenience is not due to Y!A’s malevolence;

▬ in spite of your avatar I believe u r not Greek. But!
♣ gives φ not Σ in my office! Thus cannot be used by them as the base. They really use Unicode fonts as the base for non-English characters. I investigated this issue through old DOS viewer and found out that Unicode fonts take 2 to 5 bytes, while is 1 byte character only.

♥ OK, I surrender to your reasons!

Answer 3

In phrase you'll be able to insert an upload on known as Microsoft Equation three.zero (I feel it can be hooked up on any Office software). This will enable you to variety in precise and difficult formulae. To do that move to Insert>Object>Create New>Microsoft Equation three.zero comply with the recommendations