According to numerous sources, Google is beginning to implement real time search into their search engine results. Matt Catts from Google has stated it will be after the holidays, that recent changes will fully take effect. Some new results are already starting to appear for high traffic searches. It seems as though there is a major focus on news, blog results and video, but somewhere in the middle of the page their is often a Timeline set of results, with news, and perhaps some Twitter updates in the near future.
This has been a very busy period for Google with no less than 38 new search products in the last 70 days. It seems as though the next big thing is going to be language translation. In Google Wave, there is already an on-the-fly robot translator called Rosy. Google’s next foray, according to Marissa Mayer, vice president in search products, will be to evolve beyond the English Internet. As it currently stands, Google searches in the user’s native language, and returns results in the user’s native language. Much of Google’s vast index is in English. The challenge Google has undertaken, is to search using search words translated into all the world languages, search in those languages, and report back the results in the searchers native language.
This a huge challenge, since any machine translation, by definition is less than perfect. The re-translation back into the native language introduces errors into the translation a second time. Given the nuances of language and the many shortcomings of Google’s translator, (even though it is one of the best ever made), this is perhaps one of the greatest challenges Google has ever undertaken. This is something that will take many years to develop and hone in order to be effective. It will be very interesting to see how Google handles this new challenge. For bilingual, or multi-lingual users it will be especially interesting to check results in each known language and see how they compare. It is becoming a cliché that US web site promotion and international business promotion will never be the same.
