Family Name rules aren't robust enough

[mwmalinowski]

Sometimes we have a compound family name:

• Weitlaner-Beckmann Retractor

Sometimes we have two family names that are mostly the same, save for one key difference:

• Foerster / Ballenger Sponge Forceps
• When this instrument is 7" it's a Ballenger
• When this instrument is 9.5" or more it's a Foerster
• Other than the length these are identical instruments. Customers may not know that there's a difference and may use Ballenger, Foerster, and Foerster-Ballenger all interchangeably. I've been using "Ballenger / Foerster" for 7" instruments and "Foerster / Ballenger" for the longer instruments

Sometimes the two family names are true aliases and have no known difference

• Lorna (Edna) Towel Forceps -- Lorna and Edna are both equally correct, but Lorna is more common so I list it first
• Knapp (or Knapp-Iris) -- Although we don't carry any overlap between Knapp-Iris scissors and Iris scissors, all Knapp scissors appear to be Iris scissors. Judy Hay emailed Dimeda about the difference. Dimeda replied that they checked their stock and there is no difference between Knapp Scissors 10.5cm Smooth Sharp/Sharp and Iris Scissors 10.5cm Smooth Sharp/Sharp.

Sometimes the differentiation is not consistent in the industry:

• Some suppliers offer Bruns Bone Curettes with round cup tips and Spratt Bone Curettes with oval cup tips. Other suppliers instead offer Bruns Bone Curettes with round cup tips OR oval cup tips. The instruments are the same.
• Adson (Ewald) Thumb Forceps

Sometimes translations yield multiple variations:

• The name Böhler transliterates to either Bohler or Boehler. Bohler is a better visual approximation; Boehler is a better pronunciation approximation. All three are used in the industry. I've been listing them as Boehler / Bohler. I don't want to pick just one because both are viable search terms.

Sometimes typos are so industry-pervasive that we include them:

• Babinski / Babinsky

I've also considered that maybe we should only use hyphenations for actual surnames:

• e.g. "Bishop-Harman Iris"

I've listed everything above according to what I've been doing to this point; I'm not saying that these are the formats that we must use, moving forward.

[sklar-sherryp]

I think any differentiation due to translation or typos should be reflected with parenthesis rather than a forward slash. I associate the forward slash with another unique name. If the names are actually referring to the same individual but it is only misspelled or typed incorrectly I think that is best indicated by parenthesis. This could be applied to aliases as well. As if to say (also known as ...)

[mwmalinowski]

The reason I shied away from parentheses was because of multiple aliases--usually when there are spelling discrepancies mixed with aliases.

How would you write up 85-6450?

• Zipser is the most common name and (to my understanding) the correct name
• Stockmann-Zipser is an alternative that some use
• Zipster is a common misspelling
• Stockman is a common misspelling

Ideally this is something that the backend search engine code should deal with... but currently that is not the case.

[sklar-sherryp]

Ideally this is something that the backend search engine code should deal with... but currently that is not the case.

Does this mean that on the website we could identify the instrument by it's correct spelling and/or correct industry standard name, but have the ability to allow buyers to pull up that same instrument if they enter an incorrectly spelled name? ([e.g. Buyer types Zipster, Stockman-Zipser or Stockmann-Zipser etc. but Zipser comes up in the search -because Zipser is actually the correct name and the correct spelling)

[mwmalinowski]

I don't believe we currently have the capability, but it's not outside the realm of feasibility. I'm not sure I would want the search engine to do it without a "did you mean _Zipser_" or something like that. We don't want the user to think that they got irrelevant search results.