Just two weeks ago, Google unveiled several new improvements to its translation tool. Now, the Mountain View search giant has decided to embed the feature in standard search results allowing users to better search across the wealth of indexed documents in any of the 51 languages supported by the system, and has also rolled out a multi-lingual online dictionary.
As explained by Google’s technical head Maureen Heymans and product manager Jeff Chin in a post published on Google’s official blog, the integration of translation with standard search will allow users to search the Web in any of the supported languages while you search for a query that is typed in your own language.
To enable the translation feature, users need to click on ‘Show Options’ at the top of the search results page and choose ‘Translated Search.’ Upon the mention of the search term by the user, Translated Search selects the different languages in which to translate the user’s query, and presents the listing of search results written in those languages. The results coming from translated search will be displayed on the top of the regular search results, highlighted with gray borders.
Along with this announcement, Google has also silently rolled out its own online dictionary, a multi-lingual tool supporting all of the 51 languages featured in Google Translate that offers the ability to promptly define terms in any of these languages. Rather than compiling it autonomously, Google chose to use information that is already available on third-party resources such as Wikipedia as well as authoritative university databases including Princeton and Oxford.
Apart from the functionalities you’d normally expect from a multi-language dictionary, there is also the option to “bookmark” a definition so that you can quickly come back to it later on. You can also see a list of recent searchers and switch languages in a matter of a couple of seconds, and even accompanying photos for some of the terms when relevant.
Google’s entry is obviously not good news for the wealth of other web dictionaries, particularly in the event that the search giant eventually decided to integrate this tool with standard search rather than keeping it on its own website, separated from the rest. As of now, you can already get a definition by typing “define: ” followed by the term you’re interested in, but this is not a particularly user-friendly trick and not one that the typical Google user necessarily knows about.
The company that would be likely to suffer the most from this hypothetical integration is Answers.com, as it is currently Google’s default whenever a user clicks the “define” link on a Google results page and features comprehensive results including up to date Wikipedia entries and information from a number of sources.
In any case, Google’s dictionary will almost certainly turn out to be more useful than the company’s failed attempt last year to challenge the Wikipedia dominance with the user-generated Knol, which was supposed to collect authoritative information written by field experts that would, if they so chose, receive a small compensation each time a visitor clicked on an AdSense ad featured on the same page.
Dario Borghino is a computer engineering student at Turin's Polytechnic, Italy. He started writing science and technology related articles in February 2008 and his articles have appeared on sites such as ISEdb.COM, eHow and Suite101.com.You can visit his personal Web site here.
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