Now the whole earth used the same language.  And it came about as they journeyed, that they found a wide open plain.  And they said to one another, “Come, let us build for ourselves a tower whose top will reach into heaven.”

Then the Lord came down to see the tower which they had built.  The Lord said, “Check this out!  They are one people, and they all have the same language.  Come, let Us go down and mess with their heads, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.”  Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of the whole earth. (my translation)

Why did God feel the need to take people who all spoke the same language who understood each other and confuse their language?  Beats me!  But ever since that time, people have been looking for ways to put things back the way they were. 

Here at AltSearchEngines, we went from  The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines to our Master List of 1,000 English language search engines.  But then one day it dawned on me - not all search engines are written in English!  (”Gifted” may be the word you’re searching for…)

So we started our series “Around the World in Eighty Weeks,” and added a Global tab, but there was still one big problem, I couldn’t read any of the search engines that I was posting!

So we began recruiting bilingual volunteers to guide us to alternative search engines from around the world.  The great success of this effort has taken us to Germany, South Africa, Hungary,  and Brazil, just to name a few.  Because these wonderful volunteers can discern which engines are worth mentioning, and can provide their own analysis, I doubt that they will ever be replaced by machines.

Or, if they do become obsolete, I will be too, so it’s really not worth worrying about.

Google, for its part, will often have a “translate this page” option, where you can have a page in one language translated into another.  There’s also the Google Toolbar that instantly translates words on English web pages into other languages.  And if you don’t see your native language on Google, you can help Google create it by becoming a volunteer translator for them.  (We need you more!) Google Images has language tools as well.

All of this activity is important, because if the topic that you’re researching has a total of a thousand results, but only five hundred are in your language, the other five hundred aren’t usable, unless you take a few extra steps, either via machine translation or human.

Oh, Google can also translate into “Bork,” a rare glimpse of Google-humor!

Here is my plea from yesterday in Bork: Help Vunted:  Here-a et EltSeerchEngeenes, ve-a oonly speek Ingleesh.  In oorder tu cuntinooe-a oooor veekly tuoor ooff seerch eegeenes eruoond zee vuld, ve-a depend oon beelingooel fuloonteers leeke-a Keemun Kung vhu vrute-a thees erticle-a fur us.  Interested? Pleese-a imeeel me.

Interestingly, it’s image search (such as Polar Rose, Like/Riya or Mobot), searching solely by the image itself, without relying on any text at all, that will put an end to all of this translating for pictures. Then you will simply upload a picture of a wolf, and the search engine will find all other wolves just by their similarity to that picture, without any words or “tags” at all.  But that’s another post.

One alternative search engine that’s trying to “machine solve” the problem of image tags that are written in hundreds of languages is PanImages.  PanImages is a search engine that is designed to help you overcome this babel of languages and find hopefully all of the images that relate to your query.

PanImages is a step towards an Internet that is not limited by language barriers. With PanImages, you can find pictures on Web pages that are written in hundreds of languages.

Simply type in a word in your own language, and PanImages will find a list of translations in multiple languages. If the query has more than one meaning, PanImages presents separate lists of translations for each sense. You can choose which translations will be sent to Google Image Search and Flickr, and can experiment with the different results you get from different translations.



The result is pictures of “wolves,” regardless of the language of the “tag.”

How to Use PanImages:

Type in a word describing the desired image.   Click the ‘Translate’ button.   If PanImages finds your word in multiple languages, you will be asked to select the one you want.  PanImages will then present translations of your word in multiple languages. If the word has more than one meaning, there is a list of translations for each meaning.  Select the meaning that you want.  PanImages will highlight that meaning and show you translations for that meaning.   Now you can see images by clicking on a translation.

Right now, PanImages only queries Google Images and Flickr.  

And about that Esperanto search engine (How many people remember the Esperanto movement?):

P.S. If you click on the “Babel” link in the beginning, the tower will spin.  Pretty cool.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 16th, 2007 at 4:51 pm and is filed under Guest Authors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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