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WIth the advent of the internet, the Better Business Bureau moved to make reports from all the individual BBB offices available online. The reports remain the responsibility of each BBB office, and each BBB has its own web site, with its own idiosyncracies, but the central BBB web site at http://bbb.org allws for reports from all offices to be searched at once.

However, the search capability on the individual BBB web sites varies from the national search.

One of the problems that the search tool must deal with is variations in how names are entered. The national BBB site uses a simple, but effective normalization process to handle this problem. The normalization process ignores certain minor differences, such as spacing and punctuation.

In particular, this means that a company can be listed in a BBB report as "IBM" or "I.B.M." or "I B M" and be found using any of those when searching.

That's the way the search on the Los Angeless Better Business Bureau (officially, "Better Business Bureau of the Southland") web site worked too. That was, until they upgraded their web site.

On the new web site, here's what each of these variations returns:

Furthermore, there's really no clue offered about this new behavior, nor any mention that the national serach just simply works better. Someday, maybe those Southlanders will get a clue that they messed this up pretty badly, but for now, they're clueless.

Topic CluelessLosAngelesBetterBusinessBureau . { Edit | Ref-By | Attach | Diffs | r1.1 }
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Revision r1.1 - 30 May 2005 - 04:04 by EliMantel web search for EliMantel
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