Google And Tone Markers

[DavidHouston]

I enter a Google search "การเกษตร ข้าวสาร เมืองไทย" and I get back mostly stuff like "ข่าวประชาสัมพันธ์, ข่าวเมืองไทย, ทรัพยากรสัตว์น้ำ, ....การเกษตร".

Is Google tone blind? I mean technically.

[CSS]

I enter a Google search "การเกษตร ข้าวสาร เมืองไทย" and I get back mostly stuff like "ข่าวประชาสัมพันธ์, ข่าวเมืองไทย, ทรัพยากรสัตว์น้ำ, ....การเกษตร".

Is Google tone blind? I mean technically.

I think it is. I remember getting results back from different searches that I've done where it would give responses based on the characters of the words but not the tone markers.

[rockangel]

Are you interested to know about the Thai Rice situation? so why don't you try searching as "ราคาข้าว การเกษตร เมืองไทย" instead....I think you may find some details

[Rikker]

This is a very dubious "feature" that Google added a number of months back. Mike (of thai2english.com) and I have both written Google to complain about it.. others should, too! Yahoo is following in their footsteps now, too, but the behavior isn't exactly the same.

[DavidHouston]

Are you interested to know about the Thai Rice situation? so why don't you try searching as "ราคาข้าว การเกษตร เมืองไทย" instead....I think you may find some details

Thank you for that suggestion. Actually, I am looking for some background material regarding the Thai rice market in general. What is the historical and current relationship between rice farmers and urban middlemen; how much of the middle man function has been assumed by the agricultural cooperatives and the Ministry of Commerce; how much government intervention is there in the intergovernmental rice marketing function; how much arable land is currently fallow which could be used for riziculture; what are sources of fertilizer other than chemical fertilizer, the latter of which is affected by the price of natural gas; how much rice is traded on the futures exchange and how much of these market functions are actually utilized by farmers and cooperatives; is there sufficient water resources to allow significant expansion in rice production; are there areas in Thailand which can produce more crops per year than are currently produced?

If anyone knows any sources of current information on these topics in English or in Thai, I would very much appreciate knowing. Because I am not in business, my interest is purely amateurish, or perhaps even voyeuristic, but I am interested nonetheless. I have been looking at the articles on the Journal of Kasetsart University but have not found exactly what I am looking for. Thanks for your interest and assistance.

Thanks.

[meadish_sweetball]

This is a very dubious "feature" that Google added a number of months back. Mike (of thai2english.com) and I have both written Google to complain about it.. others should, too! Yahoo is following in their footsteps now, too, but the behavior isn't exactly the same.

A similar new 'feature' is wreaking havoc with my searches in Swedish too. It's started to ignore the diacritics... Not a good idea.

[Richard W]

This is a very dubious "feature" that Google added a number of months back. Mike (of thai2english.com) and I have both written Google to complain about it.. others should, too! Yahoo is following in their footsteps now, too, but the behavior isn't exactly the same.

There is a limited way of restoring some of the selectivity. Put the worst affected word in double quotes.

Is it actually within forum rules to say that tone marks matter? I thought there was an ungainsayable opinion that they could readily be dispensed with. From an Oxford man, I hasten to add.

[Rikker]

Putting the search term in quotes doesn't work at all for non-dictionary words. Try, say กิ๊ฟ, and you'll see a bunch of results for Giffarine (กิฟฟาริน) mixed in. This happens both with and without quotes.

It does seem to work for dictionary words, though.

[siamesekitty]

I've noticed it as well. Thought it was 1.intentional (as people use the wrong tone markers all the time) and 2.there all along, just that I hadn't noticed it, or my previous searches happened to bring up more relevant results (so the weird results didn't show up in the first few pages)

[Rikker]

It's definitely intentional, because it's a new addition (it definitely hasn't been there all along). And it has been useful for me on a few occasions. But most of the time it's not at all useful, which is why it should be an optional setting.