Update: "Upper Case" or "lower case" - it should not matter in search engines

Last week I wrote about not being able to find information about Attersee on the portal of the Austrian National Tourist Office (ANTO). This is how I went about my research. I remembered they feature information about regions in a section called Travel Guide (Reiseführer). A normal user would probably not have known. I did, because I closely monitored the site when I was with the Vienna Tourist Board. After clicking on Travel Guide you have to choose Federal Provinces.

Austria is made up of nine federal provinces. This is where I got lost. I had forgotten which federal province the lake region of Attersee belonged to. Was it Styria oder Salzburg? I just could not remember. It turns out Attersee is in Upper Austria. Now, if even an Austrian (or so, given that I grew up in Germany) does forget, should you expect a potential foreign visitor to know the nitty gritty of your national geography? I also tried to find "lake region" somewhere on the navigation, but I couldn't. Anyway, at that point I left. I never even considered using their search engine.

In his comment on my article Destination Marketing: It's about service, stupid fellow blogger Martin Schober from the ANTO asked me to use their search-engine. I did, but to no avail.

Then a reader, who is with the internet agency responsible of the ANTO website, commented that she indeed was able to find a fair amount of results when searching for Attersee with the site' s search engine.

Well, I retried. Again no results. I could not understand. What had happened? How was it possible? I then searched for Attersee with a capital A instead of the sloppy lower case a. Guess what, it worked. I am not a search engine specialist, so I am curious. Do you always use upper case letters correctly in search engines? I sure don't.

Update: Jordi and Wolfgang commented, that lower or upper case letters should not matter in search engines, because people mostly use lower case letters. Thanks for your input. I have tried to reproduce the results I described above, using different cities like Vienna, Hallstatt or Salzburg and switching between lower and upper case letters. The results are surprising. One second attersee works and Attersee does not. Then there are neither results for hallstatt nor for Hallstatt. Which makes me conclude, that something is wrong with the search engine. It is not a matter of upper or lower case letters.

Comments

[Kommentiert von: wolfgang]

It's prooven that people don't use capital letters in search engines very often! So I regard this as an error in programming the internal search engine of the website of the ANTO...

[Kommentiert von: Jordi]

As wolfgang says, people don't use capital letters using a search engine. When you develop a portal with so a huge amount of information, the search engine becomes maybe the most important tool in the website. Is about what people does. When you enter on the Internet, you type in google because is maybe the easiest way to fing information. So, why don't expect a visitor doing the same in your destination portal?
I don't need to know about regions, administrative departments and so on, I just want to go on holidays!

[Kommentiert von: Martin]

Karin - thanks a lot for your help. We will correct the mistake.
yours
Martin

[Kommentiert von: Harald]

Hello,
We are using Google Business Search on austria.info for several months now. This means that we send the user's search query to Google, and we merely display the results we get back from Google.
I tested your issue and did not find any problems with lower/uppercase spelling.

However, we are currently experiencing some difficulties in the course of the design refreshment. These should be just temporarily.

We strongly agree that upper/lowercase spelling has to play no role in searchqueries and will test that particularyly in the upcoming weeks. I'm quite surprised about your find, as Google itself doesn't make any differences about upper/lowercase spelling afaik.

cheers, Harald