by Hasyapriya das, January 22, 2012
We have decided not to use any diacritical marks in our posts on the Seva Ashram’s web sites. The main reason is that when someone performs a search with Google or another search engine, our posts can be found more often when we do not use diacritical marks. There are also difficulties because of font incompatibility, but this issue is becoming less of a problem and there are now several work-arounds.
We want people who are searching the internet to find our posts. Google has tools to show how many searches are conducted each month on key words or phrases. People search more without using diacritical marks in their searches. You can see an example at Google’s keyword search tool: https://adwords.google.com
Google’s average number of searches per month:
Searching without diacritical marks: |
Average Global Monthly Searches |
Average Local Monthly Searches |
Krishna |
4,000,000 |
500,000 |
Searching with diacritical marks: |
Average Global Monthly Searches |
Average Local Monthly Searches |
Kṛṣṇa |
165,000 |
33,000 |
If someone searches for Krishna (without diacritical marks) but our article references Kṛṣṇa (with diacritical marks), then Google will not find our article for this search.
To remove diacritical marks from an article, we use a tool on the web called diCrunch. You can find it at: http://www.codewallah.com/diCrunch/diCrunch.php
The settings I have used successfully are:
Source: IAST Unicode
Target: Remove
Paste your text into the box on the top of the page, click on the Click to Convert button, and the text without diacritical marks will appear in the lower text box.