Google Search now comes with cross-language capability

Search giant Google is now using cross-language information retrieval as one of the major improvements to its web search capabilities. Google Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts said this is one of the several new algorithms they developed in the last two weeks to improve search. “For queries in languages where limited web content is available (Afrikaans, Malay, Slovak, Swahili, Hindi, Norwegian, Serbian, Catalan, Maltese, Macedonian, Albanian, Slovenian, Welsh, Icelandic), we will now translate relevant English web pages and display the translated titles directly below the English titles in the search results," Cutts said in a blog post. He said the feature was available previously in Korean, but only at the bottom of the page. Now, he said clicking on the translated titles will take one to pages translated from English into the query language. Other improvements to search in the past weeks include:

• Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content: This change helps Google choose more relevant text to use in snippets, where it is now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.
• Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors.
• Length-based autocomplete predictions in Russian.
• Extending application rich snippets to let people searching for software applications see details, like cost and user reviews, within their search results.
• Retiring a signal in Image search, related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.
• Fresher, more recent results, impacting about 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10 percent of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.
• Refining official page detection, to determine which pages are official. This will tend to rank official websites even higher in Google’s ranking.
• Improvements to date-restricted queries.
• Prediction fix for IME queries, which improves how Autocomplete handles IME queries (queries which contain non-Latin characters).