Search bar matches string against common names for all languages

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Platform (Android, iOS, Website): Website

App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About):

Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Chrome

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: inaturalist.ca

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I’m not sure whether this should be placed here, as I’m not certain whether this functionality is intended or not.

When using the search bar to find a taxon, it seems to now match the string against the common names of all languages. This obviously makes it more cumbersome to find direct matches, such as in the example provided where a broad search term like grouse returns mostly irrelevant matches. I don’t know when this started occurring, as I search regularly and only noticed it today - but maybe I’ve just been blind previously and it’s been this way for some time.

We have the option already to set our preferred language, as well as add multiple other languages and prioritise the common name lexicons within the site settings. The search functionality should respect those settings, and so in my case where the only set lexicon is the place default (English), the common name matching should only filter against that.

this is not a bug.

you can make a feature request for this, but i think what you’re describing would complicate things a lot.

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I perceive it as a feature, not a bug. I memorized a lot of abbreviations for taxa in german, english and scientific names which give me the wanted result as close to the top as possible. My shortest way to get beetles is to enter “käfer” (“beetl” is also 5 letters, but almost all on the left hand), the shortest for dragonflies is “o”, butterflies “le”, araneomorpha “typ”, liliopsids “mo” etc. I keep finding more and I wouldn’t shy away from using some in more languages.

If there comes a feature request to remove it, please make it optional as I would prefer to keep it the way it is.

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