Web searching in a multilingual world

A study of three prototype Web search portals in Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic, reveal how to best support non-English Web searching. Baidu.com is a major search engine in mainland China, which has collected more than a billion Chinese Web pages from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and other regions. Terra.com offers its services in Spain and Latin America for Spanish web search. Ajeeb.com is a bilingual Web portal launched in 2000 that includes a multilingual dictionary and a Web dictionary. An experiment was conducted on sixty native speakers of these languages, where each subject was introduced to the portal and was randomly assigned different task ratio. The results in the Chinese web section showed that Chinese search engines can be improved significantly by adding CBizPort. The SBizPort experiment found that the tool helps lessen information overload and supports browsing. The AMedPort for Arabic languages achieved a significantly higher mean accuracy.