Restrict Insert

When you say "And the à etc screws things up", in what way does it do that? Surely it would just not return them any results?

What he means is don't try to restrict your input by looking for illegal characters.  There are too many options with that methodology.  Instead, only allow valid characters and remove or restrict everything else.  Change your block of code to something like this:

<cfif IsDefined("form.term") AND Trim(form.term) NEQ "" AND Len(form.term) LTE 50 AND IsValid("regex",form.term,"[\sA-Za-z]*")>

<cfquery name="ins" DATASOURCE="medexplorer">

Insert into currentsearch

(words)

values (<cfqueryparam cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar" value="#form.term#" maxlength="50">)

</cfquery>

</cfif>

Please, please, please, always use <cfqueryparam> in your queries as well.  This will save you from some headaches too.  So in my example the regex will only allow capital and lower case letters and spaces.  You can tweak the regex to allow other characters as needed.  I am also limiting the length of the string. Make it the same as you have defined in your database. Good luck!

use regular expressions to restrict the strings to the characters you are willing to allow.