I recommend that system developers and IT managers INCORPORATE BROWSE SUPPORT AND ANALYSIS TOOLS into their online search

systems and portals to augment traditional textual list displays.

 

France Telecom, was second. Yahoo! Telemundo (Spain, telemundo.yahoo. com), the Spanish version of Yahoo! serving the U.S. and Latin America, provides a Web directory com- ^Analysis _modules piled by human editors categorizing millions of listed sites. Yahoo! Telemundo supplements its results with those from Inktomi ^Query and Google. Established in 1995 as one of the first ^{Regional Web} sites search engines to search Spanish information on the Web, BIWE.com provides a variety of services, including a Web directory, email, entertainment, and market information for Spanish-speaking users. Meanwhile, Quepasa.com, with headquarters in the U.S., is a bilingual Web portal (Spanish/English) serving Spanish-speaking populations in the U.S. and Latin America.

vance. It also meta-searches other search

_{User request} engines—Google, Yahoo!, (summarize)

Excite, Alltheweb, and Dogpile—and provides a comprehensive directory

_Summarized related to22 Arab coun-

All retrieved
^{results Categorized Web page} _results tries. Launched in 2000,
Requested
^{Web page} United Arab Emirates-
based Weyak (www.
Language- weyak.ae/) offers a range of
specific phrase
^lexicon online services covering
more than 1. 25 million
^{search The Web} Arabic Web pages. Based
in the U.S. (in New
Hampshire), Ayna.com
provides an Arabic Web
directory, an Arabic
search engine, and other

services, including a trilingual (Arabic/English/ French) email system, chat, greeting cards, personal homepage hosting, and commercial classified ads. Claiming more than 700,000 registered users, Ayna provides access to more than 25 million pages per month. Alexa Research ranks Ayna among the three leading Web sites in the Arab world.

Retrieved Web pages

User interface Search page

User’s Query

Map display

Result page of visualized

User request ^results Results

(analyze / ^returned visualize)

Folder display Summarization of categorized ^{result with} _results original page

Visualized results

Encoding conversion
Query/ results converted
into appropriate encoding
Meta-search engines

Results

Visualizer

Categorizer Web page summarizer

Language customization

Collections and meta-searchers

Regional search engines

Domain-specific collections

Figure 1. Framework for Web searching in a multilingual world.

Arabic, the fifth most popular language in the world, is spoken by more than 284 million people in some 22 countries, yet the Arabic Web is still in its infancy, constituting less than 1% of total Web content. Four major search engines offer Arab speakers comprehensive services and extensive content coverage. Ajeeb.com, a bilingual Web portal (English/Arabic) launched in 2000 by Sakhr Software Company, includes a multilingual dictionary (Arabic/English/ French/Turkish/German) and a Web directory, “Dalil Ajeeb,” which Ajeeb claims to be the world’s largest online Arabic directory. Albawaba.com, another Arabic search portal providing comprehensive services, supports searching for both Arabic and English pages; results are classified according to language and rele-

FRAMEWORK FOR WEB SEARCHING My review found that existing search engines in Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic typically present results in the form of long lists of textual items. While such presentation is convenient for viewing, it may limit users’ ability to understand and analyze the results. The collections searched by the search engines are often region-specific and lack a comprehensive understanding of the environment in which they operate. Major English-language search engines, including Google, support searching through non-English resources but fall short of covering domain- and region-specific information. There is a need to better support Web search in some emerging non-English languages. Here, I