This post is not directly related to your question, but you should probably read it anyway as it has to do with searching for Hawai’ian common names on the site.
Search is tricky and we do it differently in different places. For example, I’m planning on just not indexing the ʻokina for some fields in the search index, which means
ʻalae,'alae, andalaewill all return Fulico alai , but not necessarily at the same position in the results, and a search forʻalaemay not return it as the top hit even though it’s an exact match.