Google News

Google Searching Has Changed

Right-to-left writing search introduced

By Vlad Constandes, SEO News Editor

27th of February 2008, 09:35 GMT

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The search experience has just recorded a big change for the good from Google, that paid heed to those advising it not to neglect the Arabic languages. To the rest of the English-speaking online community, it's almost inconceivable to adjust to this, but actually a fairly large portion of the world's population uses right-to left writing and typing.

The Mountain View-based company encountered some serious problems

while trying to implement this feature for the local interfaces that support it, such as google.co.il or google.com.eg. Josh Daniel, a Software Engineer, posted on the Official Google Blog that "Enabling applications for bidirectionality is especially tricky because any sentence or phrase may contain a mix of left-to-right text (e.g. English, numbers), right-to-left text (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew), and neutral text (e.g. punctuation). The rules for displaying the direction of characters in individual words are different from the rules for displaying the direction of words in a phrase. Things are further complicated due to widely varying limitations across web browsers."

In other words, starting to enter a query in Hebrew, for example, will result in the positioning of the text on the right and going to the left, while one written in English will automatically detect the change and go about it in the traditional manner, even if it is on one of the local sites mentioned above. The mixture of the two types of writing, however, is the tricky part Daniel was referring to. A query like SMS �￭�� will generally position the alignment based on the first word, but not always. Although not detailed, a good guess would be that the preponderant style of writing will be the one that will determine whether it should be left to right or right to left.

Previously this month, Blogger Buzz also announced that it introduced changing of the homepage depending on the language and style of writing. It must have caught on, as this is following shortly in its footsteps.

TAGS:

google news | google | search | arabic | hebrew

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