[bob_roboto]

Great job! The search can probably be improved. Searching for "Cedric" without the accent aigu (é) does not yield any results, despite there being several Cédric in the database. If this was an educational project I recommend spending some time on search methodologies since they are very interesting. Start with using something like Levenshtein Distance and improve either performance or accuracy from there. Otherwise just use one of the existing open source libraries.

[Aaronmacaron]

Why would you treat e and é the same? Those are two different characters with different pronunciations. You also wouldn't treat capital i (I) and small L (l) the same just because they look similarly.

[mkempe]

Accents are generally considered unimportant in the context of a search, at least in French.

[hadrien01]

It's not just that é looks like e, é is the letter e with a diacritic [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diacritic

[matt_the_bass]

In addition to the other replies, this is important for input by keyboards that are not languages with that accent. Us “dumb” Americans don’t know how to type that off the top of our heads.

Or on mobile. It’s a pain on many devices.