case-sensitive

In computers, case sensitivity defines whether uppercase and lowercase letters are treated as distinct (case-sensitive) or equivalent (case-insensitive). For instance, when users interested in learning about dogs search an e-book, "dog" and "Dog" are of the same significance to them. Thus, they request a case-insensitive search. But when they search an online encyclopedia for information about the United Nations, for example, or something with no ambiguity regarding capitalization and ambiguity between two or more terms cut down by capitalization, they may prefer a case-sensitive search.

Areas of significance

Case sensitivity may differ depending on the situation:

*Searching: Users expect information retrieval systems to be able to have correct case sensitivity depending on the nature of an operation. Users looking for the word "dog" in an online journal probably do not wish to differentiate between "dog" or "Dog", as this is a writing distinction; the word should be matched whether it appears at the beginning of a sentence or not. On the other hand, users looking for information about a brand name, trademark, human name, or city name may be interested in performing a case-sensitive operation to filter out irrelevant results. For example, somebody searching for the name "Jade" would not want to find references to the mineral called "jade". On the English Wikipedia for example a search for Friendly fire returns the military article but Friendly Fire