title: Perform accent insensitive fulltext search MySQL
body: <p>I'm currently developing a search functionality for a website. Users search for other users by name. I'm having some trouble getting good results for users that have accents on their name.</p>
  
  <p>I have a FULLTEXT index on the name column and the table's collation is utf8_general_ci. </p>
  
  <p>Currently if somebody registers for the site, and has a name with accents (for example: Alberto Andrés), the name is stored in the DB as shown in the following image:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/DG80y.png" alt="Alberto AndrÃ©s"> </p>
  
  <p>So if I perform the following query <code>SELECT * MATCH(name) AGAINST('alberto andres')</code> I get lots of results with better match scores like 'Alberto', 'Andres', 'Andrés' and finally with a low match score the record the user is probably looking for 'Alberto Andrés'. </p>
  
  <p>What could I do to take into account the way accented records are currently stored in the DB?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks! </p>