Re: How do search engines index multilingual content?

Andreas Prilop wrote:

> On Mon, 30 Jan 2006, Philip Ronan wrote:
>
>>> The lang attribute is recommendable, but it has _no_ verified effect on
>>> search engines.
>>
>> What do you mean by "verified"? Google mention that some pages provide
>> insufficient context for guessing the language of a web page. See
> ^^^^^^^^ !!
>> <http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/help/faq_translation.html#link>,
>
> They don't mention the LANG attribute here.

So read between the lines. It's quite obvious Google uses certain technqiues
to ascertain the language of a web page. Examining lang attributes (where
available) is an obvious method for achieving this with the least effort.

Here's something you can try: click the "Advanced search" link in Google, and
search for pages in English that contain the phrase "Der Spindoktor". Then
take a look at the lang attribute in the HTML tag of the top result.

> Google Groups still ignore the charset parameter
> of Usenet articles. Instead they use the group name and I-don't-know-
> what-else to select an encoding for an article.

That's an inevitable problem caused by putting multiple articles (with
different charsets) in a single web page. Google Groups has plenty of other
problems, but this has nothing to do with lang attributes.

--
philronan [@] blueyonder [dot] co [dot] uk

.


... each column represents a language.... > That should mark all cells in the first column as French, ... any lang attribute settings ignored most of the time. ... since that property is not inherited (in the CSS sense) into cells. ...
(comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html)

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