Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think despite all the article's flaws, that point you mention is very valid- google is a very American product, with the good-enough-for-us-means-good-enough-for-the-rest-of-the world.
It's still great in Canada, too. Don't even say it, we're totally different and unique.
Why Google is not winning in Russia - and unexpected search comparison results
21–27 of 27 posts
Re: Why Google is not winning in Russia - and unexpected search comparison results
#22Great article about language as the last man standing against globalism. If you ever have to manage the translation of a piece of software into a different language, you will find two kinds: One in western chars where you can get a feeling about the translators work and one in different chars like russian, japanese, chinese, arabic where you don't get a ghost of idea what is written there. For search engines this is…
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87pevh2Q0hg&feature=playe...
The entire interview is great, check out the first part here:
Re: Why Google is not winning in Russia - and unexpected search comparison results
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's still great in Canada, too. Don't even say it, we're totally different and unique.
when you search in French from Canada, do you get results from France as well?
http://www.google.ca/search?source=ig&hl=fr&rlz=&...
Google does have some god-awful URLs though.
Re: Why Google is not winning in Russia - and unexpected search comparison results
#24Ouch. I can't help but think using the Swedish Google to search for Russian is hardly a perfect example of science here. Why isn't he using google.ru? I have no idea if it would return different results, but his current article doesn't prove as much as he thinks it does. (Although, Library of Congress? Seriously?)
Yeah, hardly scientific, but it's at least anecdotal evidence that there's some room for improvement. Like you I wonder how different the results are with google.ru though. I live in Ireland, but sometimes do queries in Dutch. Google.nl often gives different and much better results for those than google.ie. Also slightly off-topic: I appreciate that English isn't the author's first language, but, wow, that was painfu…
Re: Why Google is not winning in Russia - and unexpected search comparison results
#25Most of all, google cannot find information in my blog (it is in russion and it is Lifejournal one) for a long time while yandex still can (Yandex Blogs). Google search is quite forgetful. After certain amount of time you just cannot find something you need.
Well, for Yandex, livejournal is as important as .gov domains for google. Livejournal.com is very important for Russians on the internet and completely irrelevant for everyone else. It's where american teenage goths write diaries about fat issues for us Yankees. In Russia, a lot of important people blog there, with thousands of readers and followers.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=ru&q=site%3Anews.ycombin...
So maybe LJ isn't all that teenage goth for hackers.
Re: Why Google is not winning in Russia - and unexpected search comparison results
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good question. I am a Russian speaker - ran the same searches on google.ru and got much better results (than google.se). Were Google.ru's results better than Yandex? Probably not. Perhaps the problem isn't quite as fundamental (non-English NLP sucks) but has more to do with secondary Locale handling in specific countries? Interesting observation on US-centricity (is that a word?) nonetheless. Many major US Corps deri…
You raise a very interesting point. Just because a lot of American companies draw a large amount of income from abroad does not make them respect the market or adjust the product to that market. IN fact, US imperialist policy (and that is simply what it is, don't take me for a rebel commie, but a country that has been at offensive war for most of it's history cannot be named anything but an imperialist) has insured t…
Actually, it can.
The fact that both offensive war and imperialism are bad does not mean that they're the same.
If you can't distinguish between different evils and confuse them, how do we know that you can identify evils?
In other news, imperialism is not colonialism.
Re: Why Google is not winning in Russia - and unexpected search comparison results
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't know what the settings of his computer are (the fact that the UI is in english makes me guessing he has the "hl=en" setting). He should add "&hl=ru" to the url to make sure he is searching the russian version of Google.
That's the point of the article- there is no such problem in germanic languages and many other European languages that the google algo have been tweaked for. Search on google in english and swedish, without any URL string shenannigans, get good results for both.