Search engine giant Google may come up with an Indian version of its cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) facility, which searches queries in English webPages and gives the results in native language, a senior official said.
?We introduced this facility in 15 international languages in May this year 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,? member, technical staff at Google USA, P Nayak said here on the sidelines of Infovision 2007 Knowledge Summit.
Though he declined to confirm the languages, he said that it could possibly be Hindi and or Tamil since they were the two widely used languages in India.
According to Nayak, the English web-based search engines have very large and good content, while the smaller language web pages like Arabic and Chinese do not give enough information, compared to English. This is where the role of CLIR comes in, where through its in-built translation facility, it expands the scope of the search. ?CLIR is a subfield of information retrieval dealing with retrieving information written in a language different from the language of the user’s query,” he added. When a query is added in native language, the CLIR automatically translates it into English and makes a search on English web pages and reverts with results both in English and native language.
?To avail this facility, the user has to log on to http://www.translate.google.com, type the query in English and seek the information in any of the 15 languages including English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic amongst others,? he said.