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The World Wide Web may not cover the entire globe, but it certainly has a presence in most populated places throughout the world. With such an international scope, the "multilinguality" of web content continues to increase. For savvy searchers, the multiple languages and content from distant countries create new opportunities for finding previously buried information resources.
To find these resources, even in languages that you can't read, the search engines offer a variety of language aids. With language limits, machine translation, translated search, and multiple interface languages, searchers have a variety of increasingly sophisticated tools to harvest information content from many languages.
TOOL DIFFERENTIATION
To make some sense of the various language tools, most of the search engine-related ones fall into one of the following categories:
* Interface language
* Language limit
* Machine translation
* Translated search
The first noticed, most frequently talked about, and perhaps least useful, is the interface language. Click on Google's "language tools," and halfway down the page you'll see a listing of 117 different languages. These are the interface language choices listed by Google as "Use the Google Interface in Your Language." These language options merely change Google's homepage text as well as the text on results pages, help files, button text, and other words used by Google within the interface itself. Its effect on searching and results is zero. Searching the same query with the English, Bihari, right-to-left Hebrew, or the oh-so-common Klingon or Elmer Fudd gets the same results (at least as far as two sequential searches in Google ever get the same results).
A search engine's language limits, not its interface language, can be used to search for pages written primarily in a specific language or languages. The language limits are typically hidden away on the advanced search pages. The machine translation tools, useful to get very rough and inaccurate translations between languages, are often buried even further on completely separate pages. And lastly, Google's new Translated Search feature aims to take a search query in one language and first translate the query and then search that translated query.
LANGUAGE LIMITS
The different search engines have different languages limits. These are almost always found under the advanced search page (which...