Search for thomas a kempis (without the accent over the à, since it's hard to type in). The top two results you'd expect to be found (The Imitation of Christ and The Works of Thomas à Kempis) end up as positions 8 and 9 in the search results, and it's only incidental that they were found at all (because the letter a without accent happens to appear elsewhere in the page; it is highlighted in the sample shown with the search hits, whereas the à in thomas à kempis is not highlighted). If you search for thomas kempis or thomas à kempis these two resources will be hits number 1 and 2.
You should ignore the accent on accented characters (or rather, match both unaccented and accented forms if the accent is missing in the search text), as Google does. It ought to be possible to search for something without having to type in all its accents.