[Web4lib] Google and multilingual searches.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Hi,

a few discusison groups and blogs have been discussing Google and its 
lack of performance in soem languages.

Google has an Amharic language interface, and a Khmer language interface 
has been under development. Which would at face value imply that you 
could use Google to search for websites in those languages.

Some of the discussions indicate that it is impossible to actually find 
websites using search terms in Khmer 
(http://groups.google.com/group/khoogle/) or Amharic 
(http://www.bytelevel.com/blog/archives/000679.html).

What is worth noting is that Google has indexed sites that contain Khmer 
and Amharic unicode content, but it is not possible to search for that 
content.

I'm curious, has anyone else had problems with other languages when 
searching Google?

I'm aware of the issues with Vietnamese due to Google not using Unicode 
Normalization, and the completely different result sets that you will 
get depending on which keyboard layout or input software you use to type 
your query.

Interestingly, Yahoo, which hasn't as many interface translations as 
Google seems to be some what better behaved with respect to multilingual 
  searches.

if anyone ahs any further information on this problem, I'd appreciate 
the information.

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Cunningham
e-Diversity and Content Infrastructure Solutions
Public Libraries Unit, Vicnet
State Library of Victoria
328 Swanston Street
Melbourne  VIC  3000
Australia

andrewc+AEA-vicnet.net.au

Ph. 3-8664-7430
Fax: 3-9639-2175

http://www.openroad.net.au/
http://www.libraries.vic.gov.au/
http://www.vicnet.net.au/