Think about it. If you’re a search buff, how often would you stumble across a site in a completely different language…?
Latin to the rescue. Everyone (and no one) uses Latin.
Image search works by leveraging user tagging or by inferring the content of images based on whatever words the publisher assigns to them (or nearby text or tags). It would probably improve if a multilingual component were added (seamless to the user).
Anyway, I typed a search for “acer palmatum blog” and then tried Google Image Search for the same term. Using this latin name was unwittingly a way of getting results that seem to come from an international community of users. I stumbled on this amazing French gardener’s blog (if you go to the home page instead of the “lien permanent” to this one particular post, it takes about 10 minutes to load but is quite amazing).
Search innovators should be thinking about this kind of thing. How to show relevant results (or images) even across languages and cultures?
World peace could depend on it.
Either that, or the south of France is invaded by several thousand Canadians fed up with shivering in the dark.
Andrew Goodman is Principal of Page Zero Media, a marketing consultancy which focuses on maximizing clients’ paid search marketing campaigns.
In 1999 Andrew co-founded Traffick.com, an acclaimed “guide to portals” which foresaw the rise of trends such as paid search and semantic analysis.
