Searching for diacritics (á vs ü)??

[Michael Howes]

(note: could be considered a newbie question)

Am trying to add a few features to a friends web site.
One feature is a search feature.
The host is running MySQL 5.0.45

I was trying to search for words with diacritic characters when the user typed in the non-diacritic character.

The WHERE clause is slightly crazy (it's bands/music so you'll get the idea)
WHERE bands.name LIKE '%" . $src . "%' OR
bands.aka LIKE '%" . $src . "%' OR
bands.name_prefix LIKE '%" . $src . "%' OR
CONCAT_WS(' ', bands.name_prefix, bands.name) LIKE '%" . $src . "%' OR
CONCAT_WS(' ', bands.name_prefix, bands.aka) LIKE '%" . $src . "%'

multiple questions
I altered the table;
ALTER TABLE `kfth_data`.`kfth_bands` CHARACTER SET = utf8 , COLLATE = utf8_general_ci ;

this seemed to allow me to both search for strings with diacritic characters but also get hits for strings with diacritic characters by typing the...err...for lack of a better word translated to english character.

so for example
searching for "As Mercenárias" returned the band correctly
searching for "Hüsker Dü" returned the band correctly
searching for "mercena" returned "As Mercenárias" correctly

but searching for "huske" did NOT return "Hüsker Dü"

does ü != u??
I'm a bit confused with what's going on....any language experts wanna fill me in?

thanks
mike