Comments on: Does Language and Culture Affect Search Techniques?

By: CarstenCumbrowski

CarstenCumbrowski — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 09:48:31 +0000

Check out this Google Translate Beta. It's the thing I mentioned in action. It's pretty nice. I played around with it a bit for the English to German search and back translation.

By: domy drewniane

domy drewniane — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 08:39:38 +0000

Really nice article.Greatings

By: CarstenCumbrowski

CarstenCumbrowski — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 15:38:17 +0000

See Google Blog and Techcrunch Interesting stuff.

By: Raj Dash

Raj Dash — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 14:42:32 +0000

Thanks, Carsten. I didn’t know that Google was working on cross-language search. That will be interesting.

By: CarstenCumbrowski

CarstenCumbrowski — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 10:04:19 +0000

Google talked about several of those things at their searchology event in May where they announced the universal search.

See video (2+ hours)

search engines do consider those differences, but they do it today more by geographic than culture. That might change with the personalized search. I am also looking forward to the cross language search that they demonstrated and talked about, especially in combination with personalized search.

Language is a reflection of culture and thus causes different ways of thinking by people from different cultures. It’s not only the language, but also the values and priorities and what is considered more relevant than something else.

While the differences (in general) between the first world countries in Europe and North America are relatively small, do exist huge gaps between the thinking of people from the “civilized” world and people from what is referred to the 3rd world.

It’s an interesting problem and every search engine that serves customers beyond a single region or country has to considers this stuff or will lose relevance and customers because of it.

By: Raj Dash

Raj Dash — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 21:33:59 +0000

Jordan: Did you learn other languages after the age of 5 or before? I.e., did you grow up multilingual?

By: Jordan McCollum

Jordan McCollum — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 21:21:40 +0000

Oh, and as for if/how it affects your searching:

Depends. Most queries are conceptually based. What if you’re using a search engine that was originally designed for another language’s set of concepts? Or not searching in your native language? Will the search engine understand? Will you?

I think that most true semantic search engines (2nd and 3rd tier) are based around single languages–for native speakers, by native speakers. It will be a while before they really have to worry about cross-language issues.

By: Jordan McCollum

Jordan McCollum — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 21:14:44 +0000

As a trained linguist and speaker of 3 languages, I actually agree with Birner’s statement. Learning a language is more than learning words, it’s learning concepts (which I think you do a great job of explaining here). Learning another language after the ‘critical period’ is often difficult because no two languages have concepts that “translate” on a 1-to-1 basis. Despite studying Spanish since I was 12, I have yet to master the subjunctive mood and map the exact usages of prepositions in every day speech–because these language concepts are so different from my own native language’s.

(Spanish is great because you can spend five years learning it and think you have it down pretty good and then realize you know nothing.)

Growing up bilingual, on the other hand, is different.