San Francisco – Search engine leader Google Inc. lately launched a test version of a translation tool that enables people to search the Internet in any of a dozen languages and have the results converted into their chosen tongue, underlining the rapidly growing company’s ambitions outside the United States.
A beta version of Google’s “cross-language information retrieval” feature can be accessed online at
http://translate.google.com/translate_s.
The tools allow Google’s users to enter search requests in their native languages and then choose to have the phrases as well as the accompanying results automatically translated into another language.
Google expects the new translation service for search results to be particularly popular outside of the United States and the United Kingdom because so much of the Internet’s content is published in English.
The languages included in the service are French, Arabic, English, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and traditional and simplified Chinese.
The service “in effect, will make the Web universal,” Google vice president of engineering Udi Manber said while describing it to the press at the Internet search giant’s campus in Mountain View, California, last week.
"We have been working on translating the entire Web to all languages," Manber said. "The results are probably not perfect, but the information you want will be there."
The service will eventually be expanded to include other languages.
By making its search engine more appealing to people who do not speak English, Google is angling to sell more advertising in international markets and maintain the impressive financial growth that has driven a more than fivefold increase in its stock price in less than three years.
Here at Google, part of our mission is to make the world’s information universally accessible to our users, regardless of differences such as language, the company said in a release.
American Technology Research analyst Rob Sanderson is among those who believe Google is poised to cash in on its opportunities outside the United States and United Kingdom.
Google collected $7.6 billion, or 72 percent, of its 2006 revenue from sources in the United States and the United Kingdom, Sanderson said in a report issued Tuesday. If the company had fared as well in other key markets around the world, Sanderson estimated Google would have generated an additional $4.9 billion to $8.7 billion in revenue last year.
"Clearly growth in international markets can significantly move the needle for" Google, Sanderson wrote. "We believe it is only time that stands in the way of capturing this opportunity."
Google’s family of Web sites, including online video pioneer YouTube.com, already attracts the world’s largest audience, according to comScore Media Metrix.
Yahoo Inc., which runs the Web’s second largest search engine behind Google; already offers a service that has been automatically translating search results in Germany, France and Japan since 2005, spokeswoman Kathryn Kelly said. The Sunnyvale-based company also offers translation tools through its BabelFish site.
More recently, Yahoo has been trying to woo more traffic outside the United States through its “answers” service, which relies on its users to respond to each other’s questions in nine different languages.
In a separate move to boost its profits, Google reportedly is nearing a $100 million deal to buy privately held FeedBurner Inc., which helps Web logs and other online publishers attract traffic and advertising through a distribution channel known as “really simple syndication,” or RSS.
Google declined to comment on its reported interest in Chicago-based FeedBurner.