Most important search engines internationally

Posted by admin in Statistics on August 13, 2010

 

     

If you already have, or are just starting, a multilingual web marketing program and need to know which search engines are the most important for your localized content, I have created a visual map based on data and rankings from Alexa.com where the current (August 2010) number one search engine for a particular country is marked along with the domain extension. I have also tried to show the “size” and global importance of each site by roughly approximating the size of the title to its overall user base.

 You are free to download and use the map as you wish but a link back to Multilingual Web Marketing .com would be appreciated. Please note that I offer this image “as is” and can make no claims as to its ongoing accuracy. I will monitor the data that I used to create it and try to update it at regular intervals throughout the year.

 The truly striking thing when looking at the map is the almost total global dominance of Google!  Google dominates in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, most of Africa, Asia and Australasia. In comparison, Yahoo has a significant presence in Asia (it is number one in Japan and Google number two) and in West Africa. Orkut (orkut.com.br) is currently number two in Brazil and is an important search engine / portal to watch. It is pressing Google for top spot in Brazil and I would recommend to actually target both it and Google when carrying out web marketing programs for the Brazilian market.

 The two most important global players apart from Yahoo are Baidu in China and Yandex in Russia. Both these search engines are well-established giants in their respective locations and appear to be  safe from any challenge by Google or Yahoo to dislodge them (Google.ru is actually 4th in Russia). China and Google have of course had other issues  and Google today operates from the google.com.hk domain which is based in Hong Kong, not mainland China. Google is ranked 5th in china at the present time. We shall be taking a much closer look at both Baidu and Yandex in upcoming posts examining how to localize websites and carry out web marketing in China and Russia.

Download the map image here.

The ten most important languages on the Web – 2010

Posted by admin in Statistics on July 17, 2010

Although still in first position, English continues its decline and stands now at 27.7% of the total. Chinese is second with 22.6% and Spanish comes in third with 7.8%.

Source: Internet World Stats

SpeakLike real-time translation chat

Posted by admin in News on March 5, 2008

A similar product to chatstat described below is SpeakLike. Launched just last month this is a real time, instant messaging, service using a mixture of automatic machine translation (MT) and human translators to edit the results. The service is currently available in English, Spanish and Chinese and other languages are to be added soon. This is a great development and I wish SpeakLike all the best of success.

There is a huge demand for a real time native quality translated chat service and I have often wondered why the major chat software companies like MSN, ICQ, Skype etc. don’t offer a similar professional quality translation service themselves. It has to come; the first major player to do it will have introduced a killer app that takes the Web another giant stride down the road.

MT systems today are developing and being enhanced all the time and, in my estimation, a top end system now should give at least 50% accuracy / usability for general subjects. This basic translation then edited by a professional translator should deliver excellent results for most chat needs.

It goes without saying that if a business can have real time native quality chat with clients and potential clients around the world it is an amazing opportunity and, once again, shows the power of the web for marketing and overcoming international boundaries.

Live chat tool available in 16 languages

Posted by admin in News on March 4, 2008

ChatStat have introduced an interesting product that gives you the ability to conduct live chat with both website visitors and any of the supported IM clients (AOL, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, GoogleTalk, and Skype) using a familiar instant messenger interface. Best of all – it’s multilingual!

They have joined forces with the machine translation software supplier LEC to create the first client interaction and IM aggregator that can translate many languages on the fly in simultaneous text conversations. The Language Translation feature expands a user’s ability to communicate in real time using as many as 16 major languages and over 120 vertical market dictionaries at the click of a button to deliver highly accurate translations.

Examples of its use include web visitors chatting with operators, inter-company secured instant messaging, and instant messenger buddy to buddy chat.