Buzz
23 Languages and Counting!
16th May, 2008Google has for long, envisioned to provide access to all the world's information and language barrier posed a major obstacle in its path. 'Google translate' was the first baby step towards achieving its dream. A recent announcement made by Jeff Chin, Product Manager, Google is a reflection of its commitment to this cause. A recent blog posted by him said “As part of the machine translation team within Google Research, I'm happy to report we've been hard at work to overcome this challenge. We've recently added translation capabilities for 10 new languages to Google Translate, bringing the total to 23 languages. The newly featured languages include Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish”. For people who are new to this tool, Google translate lets you translate a section of text or web page, into another language but has some limitations like technical terms, number of paragraphs etc.
These new languages are also available for 'cross language search', which allows you to search between any two supported languages. This would go a long way in addressing the language barrier issue, which acted as an embargo to accessing local resources. So if you are planning to take a holiday in Spain, you will be able to translate information available on the web in Spanish to the language of your choice (amongst the 23 supported languages), thus having a wider reach. I tried it for myself, by searching for 'dubai tours' by using 'cross language search' and the results were amazing. It made me realize that all along we had missed on a lot of information, just because it was written in a language foreign to us.
The sops don't end here. Google's 'Detect Language' options make your job much easier :) by identifying the language of the text you're trying to translate. So if can't figure out the language of the web page, Google does it for you. All you need to do is tell Google, which language you would like the page to be translated in as simple as that. Another feather in Google's cap.
Yahoo! India takes a big leap with 'Glue Pages'
9th May, 2008Yahoo! India has announced the launch of an innovative concept called Glue Pages (Beta), available exclusively at www.yahoo.co.in. A major development which would have far reaching implications on the future of Yahoo!
Yahoo! Glue pages promise a collage of relevant information from across the web on the search engine result pages, a new and intuitive way to represent search results. Traditional search results would appear alongside wiki entries, Flickr images, news, restaurant lists, etc. and even Google blog search results. As of now, this is feature is limited to select search term across categories such as health, sports, entertainment, travel, technology and finance. Here is a snapshot of how Yahoo! would return your search query.
According to Sandeep Shrivastava, Director - Search, Yahoo! India. "Glue Pages Beta limits guesswork for the user by providing the best of web, all onto one 'at-a-glance' page. Over time, Glue Pages Beta will be made available to more categories that are relevant to users in India. We are excited to open this up further and work with a wider ecosystem of consumers, publishers, developers and advertisers in the future".
This compelling new search ecosystem will empower user with a gamut of information and enable them to derive maximum value for their search efforts. As the Beta version evolves with time, Yahoo! India plans to extend this feature to all search terms and categories. "Searching on Glue Pages Beta will result in an experience that promises more than just web links" says Gopal Krishna, Head of Audience, Yahoo! India.
Google's Custom Search Engine - fine tuned.
It is an open secret that website usability quotient makes the website more user friendly, which in turn enhances the overall customer experience. A tool to help websites score high on user friendliness, would be nothing short of a magic wand in the hands of a webmaster.
Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager, heading Google's custom search engine (CSE) project is quite bullish about CSE. It is a tool which has been incorporated by many webmasters and site owners and lets them harness the power of Google to create a search engine customized to their needs. The search can be tailored to provide search results from one or more websites selected by you, the entire web with emphasis on websites selected by you, or the entire web. Depending on your choice and requirement of results to be shown to users, visiting your website, you could choose one of the aforementioned options.
Rajat and his team have been working to augment the power of CSE and fine tune its performance. According to Rajat; “Now, we're also looking to index more of your site's content for inclusion in your Custom Search Engine (CSE) used for search on your site “. An ideal situation would be if all the inner pages are included in searches. This could be achieved by submitting site map via webmasters tool, if you haven't done it already. By doing so you would ensure that more and more web pages are included in the custom search results and would eventually enhance the experience of your site's visitors.
However, this would not change your website's organic ranking and would not result in more pages being indexed on Google, cautions Rajat. The reason being that Google maintains a CSE specific index in addition to its main index.
