Google Launches Cross-Language Search Engine

Google has launched their long awaited Google Cross-Language Search Engine. The new search tool allows users to enter queries, have those queries automatically translated, see search results in a target language, see a translated version of those results, and then navigate to either the original or machine translated web pages.

Say, for example, you were searching for dog groomers in Paris. It’s unlikely that many dog groomers in Paris would have an English website, so you may go to Google’s cross-language search engine and type in “dog groomers Paris”. Select the “find results in” setting to French and sure enough there are a ton of sites matching that phrase.

Search results highlight the query in both the original and the machine translated version. So for the search “dog groomers Paris” both the word “dog” and the word “chien” would be highlighted.

The cross-language search engine doesn’t allow you to limit searches by country which is something that every other multi-lingual Google search engine allows. This would be an obvious feature I figured Google would have included.

It should be noted that since this search engine is driven by machine translations, multi-word queries don’t work as well. This is caused by the grammatical mistakes the translation algorithms produce.

When performing queries in English, you can perform cross-language searches in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. When performing queries in any other language your cross-language searches are largely limited to English. If you speak Korean and you’re planning a trip to Spain you’ll have look elsewhere for cross-language searches.

As someone who does a lot of cross-language research I find this tool very helpful. No longer do I need to translate my query using Google Translate, perform the search on Google, and then translate the page I land on.

All in all this is just Google mashing up services they already provide, but having all these features rolled into one tool makes cross-language research much easier.