Yahoo has launched a very interesting feature, which actually opens a whole new chapter in the history of online searches. German Web pages represent less than 10% of the entire Internet, and in order to provide the German users with the possibility of not missing on important information, Yahoo has decided to integrate in the German version of its portal an automatic news translation service.

The concept of automatic translation is not a complete novelty, but the new service is combining several different functions. For example, a German user will type in a query directly in German, and Yahoo Suche (Search) Translator will automatically translate the words into English and will return not only the results from the .de domain, but also the results of the search in English.

Each result is accompanied by the key words, translated in German if we're talking about an English site, and by a note pointing out the site's standard language. Although the operations executed in the background (translation, search for the terms in the German language, search for the terms in the English language) are rather complex ones, the search time is increased with only a few milliseconds, generally about 10 milliseconds.

However, Yahoo doesn't stop here, and if the user will click one of the websites resulted from the search, Yahoo Search Translator will generate its translation, also permitting the access to the original page through a tab placed in the same window.

Yahoo is using the Systran technology for the automatic translation, and even if the translation is not exactly 100% accurate, the result is sufficiently intelligible for the user to make a general idea about the content.

Thus, Yahoo facilitates the Germans' access to sites which have no reason to develop German versions, or simply don't intend to.

For Yahoo, this is only the first step, and the company intends to launch a similar feature for the French language by the end of the year, and extend this service for other countries from Europe and Asia.