29 August 2008

Google News Queries Returning Foreign Language Results

Mahesh KM's post to the Google News blog states:
Occasionally, sources in other languages may have extremely relevant results for your query. With this feature, we want to offer stories from these sources to you when they're helpful.
So if I type a query in English I may get very relevant results in Chinese? Mahesh points out that since there are so many English sources of news it is rather unlikely to get a foreign language result with an English query. One of the examples is searching for news about the G8 Summit from the Spanish news version. I'm surprised they did not include a link to Google-translate the foreign language results into the language of the query.

Perhaps I am reading too much into this feature. I interpret it to mean that they are translating each news article indexed into various languages and returning the most relevant from the original and translated articles. Anyone know if this is the case?

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