14 DAY TRIAL // Google's stated mission is to organize the web's information and make it accessible to all. But if there's not much information to begin with, it can't really do much. The web is huge and growing exponentially. Yet, much of the stuff that's available is available in only a few main languages. The web, for many people of the world is very limited.
Which is why Google is starting to add English language results to local searches and offering the option of translating those pages to the user's language.
"The amount of content available online per speaker for Hindi is just 1% of the vast content out there on the web per English speaker," Jordan Gilliland, a Google software engineer on the Cross Language Search Team, wrote.
"So if you speak one of the languages with less online content, some of the most relevant results for your search may actually be in English," the blog post continued.
"To help break down that language barrier between you and the answers you need, starting today you may see relevant results in English in addition to those in your default language," it announced.
Google is making these changes only for languages with limited web content, languages with wide distribution don't need this help.
For now, those searching in Afrikaans, Malay, Swahili, Serbian, Slovak, Macedonian, Slovenian, Norwegian, Hindi, Catalan, Maltese, Icelandic, Welsh and Albanian, may find English language results inserted if the content in their language is not enough to provide relevant information for the query.
The key to this is the machine translation technology Google has been developing for years. English language results may be more relevant and contain more info, but they're useless if the searcher can't understand them.
These results will include a link to the translated version of the page. Clicking on the main title in the search results will lead you to the original English page, but clicking on the link below will lead you to the translated version.