The same Greek letter has two forms depending on where it falls in a word, and they are different characters to a database. Searching for one will not find the other.
Greek has a writing rule that produces a search bug almost every Greek site has and almost nobody has diagnosed.
Sigma is written differently at the end of a word than inside it, and the two are separate codepoints. Without folding, a search for a word finds only the instances where it was not the last word.
Greek words carry accents that people frequently omit when searching. Matching folds them, so the correct word is found whether or not the accent was typed.
Greek speakers routinely type Greek words in Latin characters. Search that cannot bridge that misses a large share of real queries.
Greek visitors are served nearby and storage stays in the EU, keeping latency and residency to one answer.
Tourism, ferries and accommodation sites see summer traffic several times their winter baseline, which is planned for rather than discovered.
It looks like a content problem. A visitor searches a word they can see on the page and gets nothing, because the version on the page ended a sentence and theirs did not.
A Greek site can answer a query in milliseconds and return nothing useful, because the query and the content differed by one letter form.
One orthographic rule causes most of it, and a seasonal traffic pattern causes the rest.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Sigma folding | Final and medial forms treated as the same letter | Greek writes sigma differently at the end of a word, and the two forms are distinct codepoints, so an unfolded search finds only some occurrences of the same word. |
| Accent folding | Applied for matching while preserved for display | Readers omit accents when typing, so strict matching fails against correctly accented content the visitor is looking directly at. |
| Latin-character queries | Bridged to their Greek equivalents | Typing Greek words in Latin characters is common enough that ignoring it discards a meaningful share of real searches. |
| Seasonal capacity | Planned around a summer peak several times the baseline | Tourism-facing Greek sites have a genuine season, so a winter average understates the load by a wide margin. |
| Origin placement | EU, positioned close to the Greek market | Keeping delivery local and storage in the EU means latency and residency have the same short answer. |
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