i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Google has integrated a new search feature into Google Search which it calls Translated Search.

The Official Google Blog post Searching the global web just got a little easier, says it will help us find information from sites written in other languages. I think it is a major achievement as it would allows us to search and read pages across the web even if they weren’t written in English or a language you speak. It’s a great move to lower language barriers in Information Retrieval.

Google is in the process of adding this feature to the "show options" button that shows at the top of search results page.

Clicking the option can dramatically change the results you see. For example, my simple search for "French Cinema” produced mostly English-language results. The translated results, though, featured French Web sites with a different perspective (see the result below). It also listed websites written completely in French with no English in the search results—also the website got conveniently translated into English by Google when I clicked the link.

The end result of all this language work is that Google, a company dominated by massive data centers, numeric analysis, and engineering, is one of the best at offering a human touch.