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
