Google launches Cross-Language Enterprise Search

Google launched on Thursday an innovative cross-language search feature that is sure to be welcomed by any global organization.

Cross-Language Enterprise Search works only with the Google Enterprise Search Appliance and will find internal documents written in any language, no matter what language was used to create the query.

With more and more companies linking their global systems, by simply pointing the search engine to each system the cross-language feature will find the documents in any one of 34 languages.

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"Google Search Appliance is meant to mix 30 million documents, since the search appliance can do that all you have to do is point to all the servers," said Cyrus Mystry, product manager, Google Enterprise Labs[cq].

The cross-language tool also uses Google's machine translation technology to automatically translate the document if that feature is activated by the administrator through a dropdown menu. Otherwise, it can bring back the search results in the language they were written in.

While machine translation is notoriously inaccurate, Mystry noted that the Web has a vast amount of documents that are in multiple languages, and Google uses that along with statistical analysis to create a more accurate rendering of one language into another.

Recently, Google also created a translation feature that allows users to enter text or a Web URL and have it automatically translated.

Mystry said the goal of the Enterprise Labs is to develop and launch a new feature every six to eight weeks by posting innovations from over 10,000 Google engineers, and then making it available to about 55,000 visitors who can test the feature.