In Some Places, Local Search Beating Google

babooo404 points out Newsweek coverage of Google focusing on areas in which the search giant may be vulnerable. In some countries outside the US, local competition is handing Google its head. In South Korea a company called Naver dominates. And in Russia, portal site Yandex leads in both search and advertising. In the Cyrillic language market Google is a distant third in search, and Yandex is trouncing Google in the advertising arena by 70% to 2%.

Gotta Love It

[pembo13]

How some people treat everything "Google" as if it were special. It would be news worth *if* Google was beating local searches in foreign areas.

Re:Gotta Love It

[MoonFog]

I agree, this is a non-story really. In Norway we have a search engine called Kvasir (kvasir.no) which is very good for Norwegian stuff. Big surprise, the big American company cannot compete on accuracy versus a search engine specialized on finding Norwegian results? This is surprising how exactly?

Re:Gotta Love It

[duggi]

It is surprising thus: People (From the English speaking world) have assumed that Google is number 1. Going by its search results, it is definitely a top contender to the post.So much so that it is the common homepage for millions of internet users all over the world. The non English speaking market is generally assumed to be underdeveloped (Africa, Indian subcontinent) or Google already has something for them(Language packs). The relationship between Google and China is well known, so it is expected to dominate the Chinese and along with it, other SE Asian markets, as it did in the English speaking world. The story comes as a surprise for those who have been seeing the world in a hazy, interpolated and homogeneous manner.(I belong here too.) But after the story is published , the haziness has been removed and the story seems pretty obvious. Hence my reaction: "WTF? IS this even newsworthy?"

Re:Gotta Love It

[Yetihehe]

The story comes as a surprise for those who have been seeing the world in a hazy, interpolated and homogeneous manner.(I belong here too.)

So it IS newsworthy, as it helps you understand world better.

Re:

[thegnu]

With a name like Estanislao Martinez, I bet none of this came as much of a shock to you. I'm sure you're not as bound by the mental strictures of most Americans. I, having grown up in Mexico, was not very taken aback myself.

But I think GP has a fairly good point, that it's news until you hear it, then it's 'obvious' like the Christopher Colombus how-to-tell-an-egg-is-hard-boiled thing.

Re:

[batje]

"The non English speaking market is generally assumed to be underdeveloped (Africa, Indian subcontinent) "

I think you forgot to mention the European Continent where people speak underdeveloped languages like French and German, and Asia of course, which is just slightly bigger than China alone (Indonesia alone has about 240 million inhabitants)

Besides that, English is rather well spoken in India as well as large parts of Africa, underdeveloped as they might be.

American primary education, it's tough.

Re:Gotta Love It

[Tim C]

Actually, I rather think that was his point - that when the average American thinks "non-English speaking country" they tend to think of places like Africa and the Indian subcontinent, forgetting that there are a great many high-tech countries with first languages other than English.

Re:

[tsa]

Keep in mind that a 'high-tech' country does not have to be a 'developed' country.

Re:

[rk]

"I think you forgot to mention the European Continent where people speak underdeveloped languages like French and German, and Asia of course, which is just slightly bigger than China alone (Indonesia alone has about 240 million inhabitants)"

What part of "or Google already has something for them(Language packs)" was unclear to you?

Re:

[blahplusplus]

"But after the story is published , the haziness has been removed and the story seems pretty obvious. Hence my reaction: "WTF? IS this even newsworthy?""

Agreed on the the haziness, but logically, google was built around english so it shouldn't be that surprising that it's workers best know english and they haven't really had enogh experience in other languages, I believe that is a possibility.

Re:

[martin-boundary]

Hence my reaction: "WTF? IS this even newsworthy?"

It sort of is. One of the assumptions is that search engine technology requires a lot of hardware resources and brainpower. It's true that building a prototype index with a new algorithm doesn't require industrial scale computing farms and armies of phds, but the conventional wisdom is that if you want to compete in the big leagues, you need a lot of money, hardware, and people.

What this article is showing is that this conventional wisdom is somewhat wro

Re:

[Eivind]

Google sucks -BIGTIME- if you attempt to use it in languages other than english, atleast the two where I've regularily attempted it, Norwegian and German.

Indeed, my main *complaint* about Google is that it likes to let its search-results be influenced by the language of the searcher, even when that is explicitly not wished, and it doesn't seem to be possible to turn that off.

You can "Search the web" (default) "Search pages in German" and "Search pages from Germany", which is fine and dandy, whats less fine

Re:

[jollyreaper]

The story comes as a surprise for those who have been seeing the world in a hazy, interpolated and homogeneous manner.(I belong here too.) But after the story is published , the haziness has been removed and the story seems pretty obvious. Hence my reaction: "WTF? IS this even newsworthy?"

And thus you fall into the category of "can't satisfy some of the people anytime." Congratulations.

Re:Gotta Love It, eh

[Scrameustache]

Canadians etc look down on the rest of the world because they don't speak English as a first language?

Some Canadians look down on Canadians that don't speak English as a first language.

Re:Gotta Love It

[tfreport]

Come on versus how the French look down at me at my poor attempts while they visit MY country? I call bullshit.

While its fun/popular to make fun of the US and English speakers, few other language groups will praise someone for their broken sentences as they make their first attempts. Most people are pretty touchy when their tongue is mispronounced. Perhaps that is fair but I wouldn't say its English speakers looking down on others due to their language (perhaps other things but not language).

And no, most Americans do not have a second language. But why would they? Its not like a small European nation where you can travel or see people from other countries on a semi-often basis. There many parts of the US where you will go years without a foreign visitor. You could argue that people should travel to see the world but when you have a nation that is large and varied as a majority of Europe, what's the need? You have enough to do just to know your own country. Wait a few years and most Americans will at least be bilingual, the schools have really picked up the amount of Spanish taught.

Re:Gotta Love It

[dintech]

few other language groups will praise someone for their broken sentences as they make their first attempts.

Umm no. Japanese will often compliment you on your attempts to communicate in their language. However they are just being polite, and actually you really suck at it.

I think this is a general rule for most languages. Paradoxically, people will stop commenting on how 'good' your language skills are only when you are fluent and they don't notice your shortcomings. If someone politely comments that you speak very well in a particular language, most likely you still have some way to go.

Re:

[Torvaun]

Or when they don't expect any ability at all, such as when they are visiting the U.S., and you have not been mentioned to them as an expert with their language. My brother speaks very fluent German. He was working as a cashier, and German tourists arrived. As they were having some trouble with English, my brother switched to German, startling and pleasing them.

Re:

[MMC Monster]

You can also have some fun by praising people of their command of their native language.

I end up with 50% confused, 50% insulted.

Re:

[dintech]

I end up with 50% confused, 50% insulted.

Perhaps these should be added as Slashdot moderation types...

Re:

[Zebedeu]

I think this is a general rule for most languages. Paradoxically, people will stop commenting on how 'good' your language skills are only when you are fluent and they don't notice your shortcomings. If someone politely comments that you speak very well in a particular language, most likely you still have some way to go.

As someone who has been learning german for the past year, and getting those same compliments, I have to say to you: thanks dude, that'll really help me feel good next time I get one of those :-P

(though I agree with your post 100%)

Re:

[dintech]

Well, since you've been speaking for a year I'm sure it's still a complement that your language skills are good. Just not 'invisibly' good yet.

Re:

[jollyreaper]

Umm no. Japanese will often compliment you on your attempts to communicate in their language. However they are just being polite, and actually you really suck at it.

And it's said that even the French will be willing to default back to English, if they know it, after at least an effort was made to communicate in French. If you start right off the bat with English, you will get a withering scowl and snort as they return to their coffee and thin black cigarettes and ignoring you.

Re:

[porcupine8]

Usually, but not always. I met a guy a year or two ago who had never been out of Morocco in his life, yet spoke flawless English with an American accent, surprisingly enough. (And for those who don't know, English is not a common language in Morocco, it's mostly Arabic and French.) He sounded like he was from New Jersey, in fact. The only thing that gave him away was the fact that he pronounced the second B in bombers (we discussed the Casablanca bombings). You can bet we complimented him on his English - t

Re:

[pthor1231]

I actually found that most people wanted to practice their English with me when I was in Japan.

Re:

[dintech]

Yes, this is definitely true. Taking Japan as a special case however, 'Your Japanese is very good, isn't it?' is like an instinctive reaction whenever a foreigner attempts to speak Japanese. That's why you hear it so much when you are there. The correct way to deal with it is of course to downplay your skills even if you are very good. This is actually what is expected of you I think.

Re:

[Eivind]

Yeah, but the expectations are different.

I've ran into quite a few english-speakers that seem to take it for granted that everyone speaks perfect english, so rather than being positively surprised that you speak their language well, they're disappointed that you don't speak it -perfectly-

My english is better than the second foreign language of 95% of all Americans, I'd wager. Nevertheless nitpicking minor points of grammar or spelling is something I experience regularily.

In contrast, I speak only literally

Re:

[dintech]

I've ran into quite a few english-speakers that seem to take it for granted that everyone speaks perfect english, so rather than being positively surprised that you speak their language well, they're disappointed that you don't speak it -perfectly-

I think it depends on how cosmoplitan your particular town or city is. I live in London and most people seem used to varying abilities in English so are less irritated by it. In contrast people rural communities which deal with this kind of situation less frequ

Re:

[Deanalator]

I would argue that the reason that most Japanese people do this is because they think it's funny that white people are trying to learn their language. A good friend of mine that teaches English in Tokyo was telling me that it is often the case that American TV personalities are encouraged to speak with bad American accents, even if they speak perfect Japanese. This goes for newscasters as well as models and actors.

With that said, I have many Japanese friends in the US and Japan who can back me up on this,

Re:

[Stooshie]

... I would catch their accent and simply speak to them in German ...

I did that withouth really listening to the accent properly. They were actually Danish. Ooops!

"Bonjour, sales merdeux!"

[Scrameustache]

Come on versus how the French look down at me at my poor attempts while they visit MY country? I call bullshit.

Maybe you just suck at it so much you call them names and don't know it?

Re:

[moosesocks]

Actually, I'd say that the Americans who are sympathetic to those who don't speak perfect english are ones who remember the fact that America's an incredibly diverse nation composed almost entirely of immigrants. I'd daresay that the vast majority of the US population is descended from at least one 1st, 2nd or 3rd-generation immigrant. In World War I and II, there were quite a few documented cases of American troops killing German soldiers who turned out to be their cousins.

Of course, these days it's comm

Re:

[Alascom]

People from United States are bi-lingual, we have to speak both Metric and Imperial for measurements. :/

Re:

[Hognoxious]

Depends. In Paris people will often pretend not to understand you if you have the slightest bit of a foreign accent. Foreign to them includes Quebec, Belgium or Normandy. If you're from one of those places, you might as well be speaking Chinese.

Speaking of which, it's quite interesting to speak in French (I'm an English speaker) with a Chinese. Either of you can converse OK with a native speaker, but it needs divine intervention to understand each other - the accents aren't just different, they're diffe

Re:

[jamar0303]

One such exception is Shanghai, China. For example, all the Koreans and Japanese at my school speak fluent Chinese. It's practically expected now that if the new student looks Chinese they will speak it. The same thing happens on the street. If a person looks native but doesn't speak Chinese (that is, someone from Korea/Japan) people look at them funny when they insist on speaking English.

Re:

[utopianfiat]

Do you make the same criticism of your Cockney? There are urban Americans who blow Cockney out of the water in terms of grammatical correctness.

Re:

[dintech]

I'm a Londoner and although I find American attempts at the cockney rhyming slang to be funny and entertaining, you can still tell they are not local. Very few people actually have a skill for copying accents. For example, whenever I try to do Welsh accent I sound Pakistani. It's funny for all the wrong reasons.

Re:

[jamar0303]

Random anecdote- For the longest time I thought Naver was Japanese because when I first found it I found it at naver.co.jp and thought that the Korean site as an offshoot of that. It was when Naver Japan closed (but leaving Hangame intact) that I realized that Naver Japan was the offshoot and that Naver Korea was the main site.

Nothing is certain in the search market

[harmonica]

Big surprise, the big American company cannot compete on accuracy versus a search engine specialized on finding Norwegian results? This is surprising how exactly?

Google has good search technology, and search is automated so it doesn't really matter whether the text is Norwegian or English. In Germany Google has a market share of over 90 percent although there certainly are contenders and there is money to be made, but Google is almost a monopoly. Could be the same in Norway or Russia, but apparently isn't.

T

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, this is a non-story really. In Norway we have a search engine called Kvasir (kvasir.no) which is very good for Norwegian stuff. Big surprise, the big American company cannot compete on accuracy versus a search engine specialized on finding Norwegian results? This is surprising how exactly?

Kvasir use Google for net search, and add their own directory listings and stuff on top of it. No web search engine of their own (go to their page on how to get your site indexed, and they link you directly to G [kvasir.no]

Re:

[nazh]

I got news for you, Kvasir gets their results from Google.
http://www.kvasir.no/help/kvasirguide.shtml [kvasir.no](in Norwegian).

Re:

[Jartan]

In Norway we have a search engine called Kvasir (kvasir.no) which is very good for Norwegian stuff. Big surprise, the big American company cannot compete on accuracy versus a search engine specialized on finding Norwegian results? This is surprising how exactly?

How hard are they trying out of curiosity? I'm curious how many places google has failed even after putting in a full blown effort. That article about Russia sounds suspiciously like google just started there not long ago.

It would be nice to see so

Re:

[ajs]

I agree, this is a non-story really.

I disagree. This is a non-story to non-geeks. For the rest of us, the impact of language-specific heuristics for search weighting is very interesting. We would like to think that relevance can be assessed by looking at the structure of the Web, but as these results show, that may not be true... then again, there may be other, less technical reasons for regional success. It's an interesting thing, and IMHO, only someone who looks at this as a mainstream headline would not be intrigued.

Local innovation

[andersh]

If you really want to talk about why local beats global look at the innovations they are creating. Kvasir is just a boring and very plain search engine.

However if you look at the fantastic Sesam.no they have some great services that beat Google. A search for a name will give you a combination of actual phonebook data, blogs, newspaper articles, addresses, maps, driving directions and even their corporate roles and stock ownership. And not to mention actual *knowledge* of local geography and language. It

Re:

[Daengbo]

Yeah, but here in S. Korea, I don't even think they know who Google is. That's pretty impressive. Want to do an internet search? Naver.com. Want a map? Naver. Want a friend's e-mail address? Naver. Shopping? Naver. Jeez. It's everyone's home page. It searches everything in Korea. No one uses anything else.

Re:

[mgblst]

Just went there, couldn't understand a thing. How can people really expect to use this at all?

Re:

[Threni]

> How some people treat everything "Google" as if it were special.

I think Google is special. They were the first decent webmail service (ie they offered more than 10 megs or whatever, no annoying ads, POP3 access etc). They offer free mobile phone apps to read Gmail, or use Google maps. The language translation works. Google groups is great - ok, it's a bit buggy and you can't employ killfiles, but there's no other way that I know of to search Usenet archives, and it's pretty quick at that.

That's what

Re:

[PRC Banker]

How some people treat everything "Google" as if it were special. It would be news worth *if* Google was beating local searches in foreign areas.

Yes. In China Baidu [baidu.com] is the leader, though search is a general term covering searching many things for many people. Though apparently, Google.cn are very effective in serving and marketing to the higher revenue, more educated, higher earning customer sectors.

My main purpose for commenting was to point out the article linked solely to Newsweek pages: a Newsweek

Re:

[SkyDude]

why does everything have to be harder to do in Windows?

To keep people like me employed of course.......

OTOH

[ceeam]

Still, Yandex is unbelievable crap - results-quality wise. I'd say Top3 go in reverse in this parameter. But the problem I think - apart from advertising (Y had a rather big ad campaign some time ago) - is that Google seriously dropped the ball and showed huge negligence and ignorance when entering local market unprepared - for example, their engine did not even search for different wordforms and Russian of course has an ultra-developed word endings system. So - at first - Google was 99% useless. Plus - Y had been around the longest and most people simply don't care about switching.

Re:

[efence]

Also Google's contextual ads showing up in Gmail for mail in Russian are absolutely irrelevant to the subject most of the time as compared to mail in English. That really tells about the attention to the markets other than English-speaking.

Re:

[setagllib]

Kind of interesting that now it's the US technology industry that really leads the world in privacy violation and propaganda (because really, what is advertising if not propaganda?) Russia has really fallen behind in controlling people's lives for power and profit.

Re:

[Don853]

The Russians have gotten smarter - they're going for the energy sector instead.

OTOH-WTF?

[Romwell]

I don't know what you're talking about. Most of the times I use both Yandex and Google for searches in russian, and Yandex have been providing better results consistently over the last years. Again, Google's abilities to process russian texts are surprisingly miniscule (surprise comes from the fact that Sergey Brin is russian, could've known better).

Too western?

[bushboy]

Perhaps in the West, we often assume that Google is the only player in town worth using.
It would be interesting to get the view of someone in South Korea, for instance, as to how useful Google is to them when compared with local/regional alternatives?

It's more than likely that Google is far too orientated around the West, both culturally and in terms of results.

Re:

[fender_rules]

Naver's greatest advantage lies in its 'KIN' service, which is pretty similar to what www.answers.com provides. But most people don't go to their site for web searching however. Rather they go there for fun reading all the news articles (and all those trolling comments... yeah they're actually fun sometimes), blogs, cartoons, video clips and whatever.

It's not really comparable to Google. They're apples and oranges IMHO.

As a Korean

[ihavnoid]

The most would-be-shocking fact is that more than half of the non-technical people doesn't even know what google is (for example, my mom). In contrast, I find most of my non-technical friends have naver.com as their first page on IE. In Korea, it's quite common to see TV commercials say "search XYZ in Naver", instead of displaying its URL.

The biggest reason is because Naver actually hosts content, rather than just indexing content. Not only that Naver is a strong search engine company, it hosts a vast amount of blogs, forums, an online game site (Hangame), user-provided knowledge base, plus third-party licensed contents (such as dictionaries, public transportation routes, news contents provided by other medias, etc.). All these contents are prohibited to robots (via robots.txt), which means Google can't even index them. Thus, no matter how great Google's search algorithm is, it will be almost impossible to match Naver's quality.

Plus, running a homepage *that looks cool* is a very complicated job for a non tech-savvy person. Thus, they don't get webhosting - they upload contents to big portals. I've even seen many small businesses forget about homepages, and instead have a blog/user-created forum/whatsoever on every major player. It would be much easier for normal users to reach them (since memorizing a URL written in a non-native language would be painful), and cheaper (near zero) to maintain.

Another downside of Google is that it DISPLAYS English search results, which would be useless to them. Yes, people are lazy enough to select the 'Search for Korean contents only'.

In terms of actual users, I believe Google would fall even further behind (far behind 10th place), since there is another big portal cyworld (http://cyworld.com/), which provides personal blogging services and web-based communities.

I use many different searching methods
  - Naver or Yahoo for local information (public transport route, looking for a place for a nice dinner, etc.)
  - Wikipedia for something that's expected to exist on an encyclopedia
  - danawa.com and enuri.com for searching best deals (equivalent to PriceGrabber or whatsoever)
  - Naver for anything else in Korean
  - Google for everything else, or if all methods above doesn't give a good enough result.

As a result, I get to use google less and wikipedia more, while naver and everything else remains somewhat constant.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

their dictionary, imho, is the best. and generally speaking, searching korean words on the net is such a pita. search engines do not make sense of particles and cannot separate words when they are just written with no spacing. I mean, there's a lot of ambiguity in word separation rules in korean, so it just makes harder for google. I wonder how it works in japanese....

Please NO!

[Chrisq]

All these contents are prohibited to robots (via robots.txt), which means Google can't even index them. Thus, no matter how great Google's search algorithm is, it will be almost impossible to match Naver's quality.

This could be the beginning of a slippery slope. Suppose Google responded by ignoring robots.txt files in Korea and protecting orkut, blogger and its own sites with robots.txt files that it does not obey itself. Up until now there has been an unwritten rule - something protected by robots.txt

Ignoring robots.txt

[eniac42]

This is happening already..

http://www.ewhisper.net/blog/msn-ignoring-robotstxt-files/ [ewhisper.net]

There are ways to block search engines that do this..

http://www.ars.net/bots/ [ars.net]

Re:

[tony1343]

If Google were to ignore the robots.txt file it is possible to bring suit against Google in the United States. There have been some successful such suits based upon the old english common law cause of action "trespass to chattels" which was a relic of common law history until the internet came along. I believe one such successful action was by eBay against a auction crawler (eBay v. Bidder's Edge or something like that). Some courts I believe are unwilling to hear such a claim unless there is actual mone

The real problem ...

[WindBourne]

is the not allowing google or others to index them. If Google, Yahoo, MS or AOL were smart, they would deny indexing to search engines like this, until it is reciprocated.

Re:

[Hatta]

So would you say that in Korea, only old people use Google?

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[crossmr]

I was coming to make that point. My Korean friends all highly prefer naver, and if I ever try to search something with Google around them I'm afraid I'll get smacked. As is seemingly the custom there if their movies can be believed. While Google is expanding with news, gmail, online office apps, etc, they've got a long way to go before they could compete with the offerings of a site like naver. Even if they matched them, they'd still have to compete with brand. Though I have always wondered about the name.

Re:

[mgblst]

The big question is, when they dub over movies, to they change references from google to something else? I imagine this is how a lot of people know about google.

In Soviet Russia...

[Anonymous Coward]

Google searches you! Oh wait...

in other news...

[Dance_Dance_Karnov]

someone at google sent a memo to someone else... AT GOOGLE! story expected to be picked up by /. sports at 11.

In Soviet Russia the currency transfer trounce you

[arivanov]

Not surprising. Till recently Russian currency was not freely convertible.

As a result, dealing with an external broker for services was too painful to contemplate. This restriction formed a protectionist barrier on any service dealing with relatively small financial transactions. As a result companies like Google were locked out off the market in favour of the local brokers.

AFAIK they have a freely convertible currency now which changes the rules of the game back in favour of Google and from there on ... Oh

Re:In Soviet Russia the currency transfer trounce

[Cyberax]

Nope. It was fairly easy to work with foreign currency in Russia since early 90-s. Yandex was simply MUCH better than Google because Google have not supported Russian morphology until very recently.

For example, if I'm searching information about, say, the name of Putin's dog I can use the following search query:
"Imja sobaki Putina" - (the name of Putin's dog) and Yandex can find documents with the words
"Imena sobak Putina" - (the names of Putin's dogs - note the plural) or documents with the words
"Imen sobak Putina" - ([about] the names of Putin's dogs)
"Imena sobakam Putina" - another grammar case. ...

Russian morphology is MUCH MUCH more complex than in English. Yandex started working on morphological search in 1996, so it's not surprising that it's still much better than Google.

Re:In Soviet Russia the currency transfer trounce

[arivanov]

Interesting point... Never thought about that but it makes a lot of sense.

It is a matter of approach to morphology actually.

IIRC Google approach to morphology as a whole is to throw brute force statistical analysis at it. They use statistical models and loads of data for translation. This works wonders with languages like English who have more exemptions than grammar rules while having fairly rigid sentence ordering and relatively limited common vocabulary.

Russian is very difficult to be subjected to this approach. Due to it undergoing a forced language reform at the turn of the 20th century, russian grammar can be expressed in less than 10 pages of strict rules with around 30-40 exemptions. This grammar used to be drilled down with vengeance in Russian schools so it has not changed a bit since formulated 100 years ago.

While the rules are strict (and relatively easy) the meaning of many key grammar elements is positional-dependant. To add insult to injury it has one of the largest working day-to-day vocabularies and there are probably more ways to say the same thing than in any other language (I mean proper Russian, not "Na huja zhe tebe eto nado blad'"..

So no wonder an analytical model is more successful than statistical. Thanks for pointing it out.

Re:

[snarkh]

Russian is very difficult to be subjected to this approach. Due to it undergoing a forced language reform at the turn of the 20th century, russian grammar can be expressed in less than 10 pages of strict rules with around 30-40 exemptions. This grammar used to be drilled down with vengeance in Russian schools so it has not changed a bit since formulated 100 years ago.

I would like to see these 10 pages of "strict rules". As far as I know, no such thing exists for any natural language and certainly not or Ru

Re:

[arivanov]

The "useless" google is your friend:

http://www.ipmce.su/~lib/osn_prav.html [ipmce.su]

I used to have a "legit" version at my old house (no access to it at the mo) which was printed by Moscow State. It was 35-40 pages in total with the preface and the contents.

By the way, when I taught Russian in the USA nearly 20 years ago I had that trimmed to 10 pages for the beginners.

The problem I found with it is that most English students of foreign languages are humanity students which are heavily into memorising and not trying

Re:

[snarkh]

However, those are just "main rules". I believe that the most common rules can be listed in
30 pages or so. However this is far from the complete description of the Russian grammar (if such thing exists at all).

That sounds like my kind of language

[BenEnglishAtHome]

The problem I found with it is that most English students of foreign languages are humanity students which are heavily into memorising and not trying to use rules and logic. They can memorise any number of phrases, the most obscure lexics, etc but they cannot memorise and use formal grammar. At all. As a result they have no problem with French, Spanish, etc but with Russian they hit a wall and run away screaming that it is too hard

Now, that's informative. Thanks.

I've beaten my head against the wall num

Re:

[Cyberax]

Nope, you're thinking about Russian grammar in the sense 'how to write without grammatic mistakes'. Yes, it's not really hard - English spelling, for example, is much more erratic.

On the other hand, correct machine analysis of Russian is very hard. Rulesets are nowhere close to 10 printed pages, and a lot of things is so context-sensitive that it's not even possible to do correct analysis. I briefly worked at NLP (Natural Language Processing) area, but cowardly fled it - too much pain for not much gain.

Re:

[dajak]

If you apply any kind of analytical model in a generic search engine like Google, you increase recall at the expense of precision, certainly for pages that don't explicitly encode their language. My big problem now with using search engines like Google is the ambiguity between last names (spears) and acronyms (owl) on the one hand, and normal words I am searching for. Applying morphological rules makes this problem even worse.

I once saw a demonstration of an experimental search engine for (Dutch) historical

Re:

[jollyreaper]

Russian morphology is MUCH MUCH more complex than in English. Yandex started working on morphological search in 1996, so it's not surprising that it's still much better than Google.

Wow, Ann Coulter was right. If we killed their leaders, took over their country and converted them to Christianity, we could also teach them English and make their webpages easier to search. Psst...I hear they've got oil.

Character sets?

[ThirdPrize]

How does Google handle all the various extended character sets out there? Can you search in Cyrillic, Chinese or even French?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

You can search in Cyrillic (and in other alphabets too), but it only looks for the exact words in the query, i.e. no morphological search. This is often good enough if you know exactly what you're looking for, like lyrics of a song, but if the query is more abstract, local search engines always win.

Re:Character sets?

[rxmd]

You can search in Cyrillic (and in other alphabets too), but it only looks for the exact words in the query, i.e. no morphological search.

This is actually not true anymore. For example, you can do a Google search for "Putin" [google.com], and it will highlight results in other grammatical cases than the nominative as well. It has been like this for a year or so. It's still not very far advanced yet, but Google apparently realized that they've got catching up to do.

Re:

[Cyberax]

It still doesn't work very well. Yandex can conjugate the whole phrases and can work with composited words (words containing more than one stem). Google still uses simple word normalization.

Re:

[oliderid]

As far as I know (I use Google/Ms/Yahoo with French, Dutch and English), they deal perfectly well with any western characters. Even better they all manage local "mispelling" like forgetting an accent on a letter.

But one of my favorite search engine is www.alltheweb.com . I think it is Norwegian or something. Yahoo Bought them indirectly and I don't know what they plan to do with them.

Re:

[Scrameustache]

How does Google handle all the various extended character sets out there? Can you search in Cyrillic, Chinese or even French?

You can search in... [google.com]

Obligatory

[Jello B.]

In Korea, only old people use Google.

I'm surprised

[trifish]

They forgot by far the biggest non-US competitor, Chinese http://www.baidu.com/ [baidu.com]

The reason why NAVER in Korea tops google

[holywarrior21c]

I am student from Korea so i know very well about Korean websites. Naver gained popularity by providing human generated search engine and user generated contents such as imitation of yahoo's answer page. But there are no good search engine that supports Korean in the face of this planet. At least european laguages share common alphabet, that is the reason why google holds significant share on europe. But Korean is just different from English. As i search internet in Korean, neither google,naver returns reliable results. There are no search engine that supports basic functions like spell correction neither. (Lets say you type Koreea in google and it will suggest you that if you meant to type Korea) web portals and search engines in Korea are more like very well organized catalog with useful advertisements. There are long way to go in developing web search engine in Korean. In fact there are some progress done. Until the new technology is finally embedded into their websites it is just going to be good yellowbook with lots of ads. Funny thing is that when i use google i do my best to ignore all the ads. But when i use Naver, i only look at their ads. funnier things is tho, most scholars use google in Korea when searching Korean, because it has simpler interface.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

China

[jonwil]

It wouldn't surprise me if China is on this list in the near future, what with the recent action of the chinese government. Now is a good time to invest in search engines that the chinese government is not going to block...

Google is also blocked by some filters

[aendeuryu]

I've had interesting problems at some Internet rooms (PC Bangs) here in Korea. Every now and then you'll see odd websites blocked by some strange sort of filtering system. The one I used to go to had Fark.com blocked, Youtube blocked, ESPN was blocked, and even Google.com was blocked. Now, google.co.kr was not blocked, and when I wanted to check my analytics page, google.com/analytics was blocked, but another google analytics page accessed by https:/// [https] (not http:/// [http] was available. I'm not very bright when i

On Yandex...

[saboola]

..engine searches YOU

Business

[Capt James McCarthy]

Those are called "areas of potential growth." That's business.

Yandex mixes ads into results

[roman_mir]

I do not like and do not trust Yandex.ru because they mix in paid for ads into the search results without identifying them as such.

This

[kurtis25]

This is newsworthy because it seems that Google is less popular in areas with more high-tech wireless devices. Maybe I'm stereotyping tech cultures but Google (or no American company) has a great wireless presensce like many Asian and European companies do. Google is late to the game as far as wireless aps go so they need to convince users to move from what has been working well on the cellphone to Google. Might this be part of the Gphone (rumor) strategy to capture wireless user markets around the globe. I

local.live.com is already better than Google in US

[notaprguy]

Try it out. The UI is just as good (improved from previous version when Google was better) but the mapping is just better. Live search will automatically alter your route based on traffic conditions. The 45 degree angle shots are way superior to Google's overhead images. The only thing I'd ding Live search for is that SOMETIMES the screen re-drawing is slower. Not sure why. Any ideas from an AJAX expert?

Just for kicks

[gravis777]

As I had never heard of these two portals, being an English speaking American, I googled Yandex and Naver. Interesting websites, but I could not read them. So I used Google to translate the pages into English. Found a nice photo gallery on Naver as well as some comic strips, and Yandex told me a story about how they busted some Chinese restaraunts in Moscow for substituting Dog for Lamb, and another story from Argentina about how "the woman became the man" (I actually knew what they were refering to here as

Re:

[pipatron]

And these other search engines don't serve the interests of their stock holders?

Re:Newsflash!

[Andster]

Same reason I walk to work every day... because all damn car companies are controlled by the damn greedy stockholders.

It's 20 miles but I make it work because I'm so self-righteous.

Re:

[Scrameustache]

Same reason I walk to work every day... because all damn car companies are controlled by the damn greedy stockholders.

It's 20 miles but I make it work because I'm so self-righteous.

GM bought tramway companies just to shut them so so you'd HAVE to drive to work.
The big three had a major influence in the development of sprawl suburbs, so you'd HAVE to drive to work.

There probably wouldn't be an obesity epidemic if walking to work was a viable option for most people.

Re:

[vishbar]

Google doesn't serve your interests, it serves the interests of it's stock holders.

You do realize that it is illegal for a publically traded company not to serve the interests of its shareholders, right?

Think before you type. Think.

Re:

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Because the thing that matters is the search algorithm, and kazaa can't handle something as huge as all the webpages dealing with a particular country.

That's not the complicated part

[Moraelin]

Transferring links around isn't the hard part. The hard part is to actually get something that's relevant for that search string.

Just simple lists of keywords associated with that link won't do. We already had that kind of search engines long before Google, and there's a reason why Google handed their arse to them.

And then there are the people gaming the system for a quick profit... even if it means ruining a valuable resource for everyone else. There was an almost epidemic of link spam on all possible forums and blogs, for example, just to raise the Google rank of a couple of pages.

Most of Google's uphill battle so far has been tweaking the algorithm to defend against such "attacks".

(And now that I mention it, it dawns upon me that maybe that's why smaller national engines can do better locally. With everyone trying to game Google and generally the larger English-reading world, it could be that noone bothered polluting the smaller national searches.)

So just being able to swap links around won't do much.

A second and third problems I see with your idea are, well:

1. timing. When I search for something, I'd rather not depend on the right people being online at that exact time. I also want the answer in half a second. Google does that with in-RAM indexes. I wouldn't bet a fortune on someone doing that equally fast via several hops over the net, P2P style.

2. reliability. P2P traffic has been poisoned repeatedly by interested parties, like, say, the RIAA and MPAA. And it's entirely trivial to do so. So what's to keep other interested parties from poisoning P2P search with falsely tagged links?

Even on Google, it's not entirely rare that someone buys ad-word keywords on their competitors' trademarks or such. E.g., if you have a company called, say, "Houndwire", I could buy that keyword for an ad for my company. Now everyone who searches for your company, will have my ad served to them. Then keep my fingers crossed that if I'm in roughly the same market, some people will just go ahead and buy from me. There have been even laws proposed against that kind of impersonation.

Now for adwords it's one thing, but the same could just as well be applied to poisoning a P2P search. Which could ruin its usefulness pretty fast.