Studies of three prototype Web search portals—in Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic—reveal how to best support

non-English Web searching.

WEB SEARCHING IN A MULTILINGUAL WORLD

By Wingyan Chung

Worldwide Internet use has grown tremendously in recent years, most rapidly in non-English-speaking regions. For example, from 2000 to 2007, the online populations in Latin America and the Middle East grew by 577.3% and 920.2%, respectively [ 9]. At the same time, the number of registered domain names in mainland China (.cn) surged by 137.5% annually [ 2], fueling the growth of Web pages in Chinese, the second most popular language on the Web. Meanwhile, Arabic Web content was estimated to be doubling every year [ 1]. Such growth has created demand for better Web searching and browsing in some non-English languages. However, existing Web portals may be unable to meet it because they primarily serve English-speaking users.