Luis Morais
12-22-2005, 06:04 PM
Am I dreaming or what I have been talking about (http://www.webalorixa.net/) for a year is happening?
I have been talking and writing about the relevancy of search results provided by the MS-Yahoogle establishment in non-English-Speaking countries and comparing with the much better served results in English-speaking countries and everybody looks at me as if I were crazy.
BUT truth is that MS-Yagoogle can not serve quality results in another language even when you select that language as the default language option. So even if you select 'results in Portuguese' in any other country you will get a soup of English, Spanish and every other language from the first page onwards. So how friendly is that for local users? This is not good for national interests because you are not providing equal opportunities of access of information for everyone.
Whereas the UK, US and the whole English-speaking world is deservedly served with more results in their language and are able to access information with no or minimal language barrier, we from the other side of the world still have to elect our own language before we can make a search. This is because these search engines (Yahoo, Google and MSN) still haven't considered important to serve search results in the local language primarily.
This kind of lack of attention to detail (and what a detail, should I say!) touches people's cultural feelings which in Japan reached government level not for xenophobic feelings but for a question of development. If the common Japanese can not enjoy the internet fully due to badly localised and contextualised (http://www.webalorixa.net/artigos/desenvolvimento/6-graus-aproximacao.html) search results, that becomes an economic problem on top of the social problem it naturally is. For our markets to flourish we need to bring millions and millions of people into the web and prove that the internet is something useful, usable and easy.
I do hope that the search engine establishment wake up to fact that a little bit of sensitivity to rather elementary local issues is due and expected. Well done Japan for the eye-opener.
Luis
Article can be found here (http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/AUhp9eKd2SP8AX/Japanese-Government-May-Start-Rival-Search-Engine.xhtml)
I have been talking and writing about the relevancy of search results provided by the MS-Yahoogle establishment in non-English-Speaking countries and comparing with the much better served results in English-speaking countries and everybody looks at me as if I were crazy.
BUT truth is that MS-Yagoogle can not serve quality results in another language even when you select that language as the default language option. So even if you select 'results in Portuguese' in any other country you will get a soup of English, Spanish and every other language from the first page onwards. So how friendly is that for local users? This is not good for national interests because you are not providing equal opportunities of access of information for everyone.
Whereas the UK, US and the whole English-speaking world is deservedly served with more results in their language and are able to access information with no or minimal language barrier, we from the other side of the world still have to elect our own language before we can make a search. This is because these search engines (Yahoo, Google and MSN) still haven't considered important to serve search results in the local language primarily.
This kind of lack of attention to detail (and what a detail, should I say!) touches people's cultural feelings which in Japan reached government level not for xenophobic feelings but for a question of development. If the common Japanese can not enjoy the internet fully due to badly localised and contextualised (http://www.webalorixa.net/artigos/desenvolvimento/6-graus-aproximacao.html) search results, that becomes an economic problem on top of the social problem it naturally is. For our markets to flourish we need to bring millions and millions of people into the web and prove that the internet is something useful, usable and easy.
I do hope that the search engine establishment wake up to fact that a little bit of sensitivity to rather elementary local issues is due and expected. Well done Japan for the eye-opener.
Luis
Article can be found here (http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/AUhp9eKd2SP8AX/Japanese-Government-May-Start-Rival-Search-Engine.xhtml)