I am trying to query the Wikidata api using the following action: action=query&generator=search&gsrsearch. The query works but what I want back as a result is  human readable data about the entity. See below results:

https://www.wikidata.org/w/api.php?action=query&generator=search&gsrsearch=world%20war%20one&gsrlimit=10&prop=extracts&redirects=&format=json

I was expecting it to work that same a the wikipedia api. I can ask for various properties from the Wikipedia page. See below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=json&action=query&generator=search&gsrsearch=world%20war%20one&gsrlimit=10&prop=pageimages|pageprops|extracts&pilimit=max&exintro&explaintext&exsentences=5&exlimit=max&redirects=

So what I would expect is to get back human readable labels and descriptions (when applicable) from the api (the same way you do with a wbsearchentities query). I wanted to just use the wbsearchentities action but the index seems to be acting odd (it looks like it is a prefix search or something like that).

For example if I do a entity search for 'columbus' one of the results is Columbus Ohio and the results include human readable strings:

https://www.wikidata.org/w/api.php?action=wbsearchentities&search=columbus&language=en&type=item&format=json

But if I add Ohio to the search query the only result is for "Columbus Ohio Temple".

https://www.wikidata.org/w/api.php?action=wbsearchentities&search=columbus%20ohio&language=en&type=item&format=json

The issue that I am running into is that I am trying to match oddly formatted entity labels (It's library authority data...) to entities in Wikidata and I really do not want to do much string manipulation on the original entity label.

Does anyone have any solutions or suggestions?