The best of times, the worst of times: What's Arabic for Google?

The best of times, the worst of times

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way... Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

What's Arabic for Google?

CNET yesterday carried the story of an Arabic language search engine to be launched sometime this year. According to research quoted in the article, 70% of the WWW is in English and a mere 0.2% in Arabic. And 65% of Arabic web surfers don't speak English. A language-specific search engine is not new, Chinese web surfers already have their very own Baidu.

Geek dream? A combination of Google and Babelfish which provides a user with a native language interface, actually searches all-language content on the Web and returns results translated into the user's native language.

I can just imagine Bush now, going to Sawafi and painstakingly typing in - Where is Osama?