Language negotiation and search engines

Hi folks,

This is in response to
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-international/2004OctDec/0013.html

sorry to break the threading but working from other people's computers makes
it hard :-(

I think the question should go back to the search engine developers. Many
search engines work well in one or two languages but not generally. One of
the things that smart search engines do is simple processing of words
according to grammatical rules - for example, in english the addition of an s
or d on the end of the word rarely changes it, prefixing un- or in- often
does, and so on.

If a search engine wants to fetch content in more than one language then an
easy way for it to do so is language-negotiation - just like a user, it can
crawl with different language preferences. This actually would make the Web
work better, since fitting in with search engines is sometimes more of a
motivator than fitting in with the needs of people, for site developers.

cheers

Chaals

--
Charles McCathieNevile             http://www.w3.org/People/Charles
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Received on Tuesday, 21 December 2004 03:06:10 UTC