Google may get into regional lang search

Mumbai, Dec 19: There are speculations about the internet giant Google may come up with Indian version of its cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) facility, which searches queries in English pages and gives result in native language. It seems now Google wants to bag the regional internet users in more lucid manner.

"We introduced this facility in 15 international languages in May and it has been extremely popular. Looking at its success, there is a possibility that Google may introduce the same in any of the Indian languages, depending upon its usage" P Nayak, Member, Technical Staff, Google, said. Though he declined to confirm the language, he said it could possibly be Hindi or Tamil since they were two widely used languages in India.

"The English web-based search engines have very large and good content available. But there are also smaller language web pages like Arabic and Chinese, where search doesn't give enough information compared to English. CLIR, through its in-built translation facility, expands the scope of search."

"To avail this facility, the user has to log on to www.translate.google.com, type the query in English and seek the information in any of the 15 languages including English, French, Spanish, Chinese and Arabic," he said.

CLIR is a subfield tool dealing with retrieving information written in a language different from the language of the user's query. For example, a user may pose query in English but retrieve relevant documents written in French.

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