Does Google understand other foreign languages?
By Benj Arriola - Posted on Wed Jul 5, 2006Google and Stop Words
It is common knowledge to many SEOs that there are what we call stop words. These words are words that are not given much weight by SEs. Examples of these are word like: a, an, the, or, if, is, are and a lot more. The most probably reason why SEs do this is to save a lot on processing time, get the gist of the webpage and saving a lot more time. If ever Google and other search engines need to read these stop words, it would probably be for checking patterns in liguistics to see a natural flow of words to detect spammy content and with further understanding of natural flow of words, Google bought Applied Semantics in 2003. But just how much Google knows? Will the stop words we recognized even if they are in another language?
Google and the Tagalog Language
Being a speaker of another language, I personal know Tagalog by heart which is the language of the Philippines. Tagalog was said to be first derived from the Indian Sanskrit language and since the Philippines was colonized by many countries in its history, the Tagalog language also has many Spanish words and every Filipino can understand and speak fairly well English which is totally embedded into the Philippine educational system and mixed with everyday conversational Tagalog. With the existence of Tagalog websites and more of them coming out, one advantage I see in Google understanding Tagalog over other languages is Tagalog has very similar sentence patterns with the English language. A subject and predicate that can have active and passive voice. You have past, present and future tenses. Although singular and plural are implemented slightly different, there is still a visible pattern that is similar to spoken English.
What is Isulong SEOPh anyway?
It is actually my first time to play around with a Tagalog website after joining the Isulong SEOPh contest. On the first day of the contest, Isulong SEOph was zero results in search engines. Although there were a few websites with the words Isulong and they were oftenly a Filipino Website. And Seoph totaly meant nothing in the English dictionary and also in the Tagalog dictionary. Isulong, when translated really means to advance, to progress, to move forward, to improve. SEOPh was nothing but SEO and Ph for Philippines.
Thus I decided to give Isulong SEOPh a meaning then promote viralness to it and promote it well. That gave rise to isulong-seoph.com, using the word isulong as how it normally meant as found in some websites that were often nationalistic, political-related Tagalog websites. This gave me a notion Google already knows what isulong is and to not be in conflict with it, I used the same meaning and invented a person named Seoph! Original plan is to make it viral enough that people will link to it naturally. Did it work? The viralness? Yes it did. In fact it is the highest traffic Isulong SEOph website I have. Did the people that visit the site take the bait? Nope, I guess not, inbound links were not increasing as fast as other sites were doing.
Teach Google a New Meaning
As more people blogged about their entries, posted forums and in all forms of link building, all of the entries were about an SEO Contest. Today, Isulong SEOph is really related to an SEO contest. Their occurence together and proximity of words just happens so often in� so many isulong seoph competitor’s websites and this has overpowered my futile attempts to give Isulong Seoph a new meaning. Thus isulong-seoph.com has never significantly done well in the serps for the keyphrases Isulong SEOPH. And isulongseoph.com has been doing better moving back and forth on page 2 and 3 in the SERPs and staying only brief moments on page 1. And with the new meaning of Isulong SEOPh, it has been more difficult to get inbound links going to isulong-seoph.com from websites about SEO. The strategy of isulong-seoph.com was a mistake but it can be overcome of course with linking power but I do not have that power at the moment to augment the SEO ranking strategy of isulong-seoph.com. Thus isulong-seoph.com is probably an Isulong SEOph Failure unless I can generate enough link juice which I doubt I can do enough to catch up with the rest of the competition.
How Much Tagalog does Google Know?
Below is a portion of a screenshot from isulong-seoph.com from the Pinoy OPM MP3 page. Take note of the Google Adsense on the page.
I am not familiar what from what language Iklan oleh was taken, but it obviously means Ads by. You can see Google’s efforts in trying to understand the language on isulong-seoph.com and serving appropriate contextual ads.
But after looking at the site statistics of isulong-seoph.com, I noticed the following inbound traffic search terms are paquiao larious, mga salawikain about dalaga, paquiao vs. larius and a lot more but one of them is:
chinobela/ koreanobela naging bahagi sa pilipinas
That term above means: Chinobela/Koreanobela became a part of the Philippines. These phrases come from my statistics software AWStats and these are actual search phrases people typed to get to the site. I tried it out in Google and this is what Google suggested:
Chinobelas and Koreanobelas are Chinese and Korean soap TV series in the Philippines that are hits in the country. Even if I typed in the search phrase chinobela/ koreanobela naging bahagi sa pilipinas, It is suggesting the word buhay instead of bahagi.
chinobela/ koreanobela naging bahagi sa pilipinas
means: Chinobela/Koreanobela became a part of the Philippineschinobela/ koreanobela naging buhay sa pilipinas
means: Chinobela/Koreanobela became life in the Philippines
Could this just be an algorithm on spelling suggestion since bahagi and buhay both have start with “b”, has an “a” and “h” and in the Google database there seem to be a lot of occurences of buhay than bahagi in similar sentences? Or is Google trying to study linguistics and after seeing many sentence patterns in the Tagalog language a common sentence may be:
Chinobela/Koreanobela became a part of life in the Philippines
When translated is:
Chinobela/Koreanobela naging bahagi ng buhay sa Pilipinas.
And is Google trying to arrive to somewhat this sentence after it has based many search queries with a whole load of phrases that may have mentioned similar lines like this? What do you think?
2 Responses to “Does Google understand other foreign languages?”
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July 5th, 2006 at 9:05 am
[...] And observation on the behavior of Google and a foreign language other than English on an Isulong SEOPh website It looks like Google is catching up in linguistics 101. [...]
July 7th, 2006 at 6:45 am
[...] While the IsulongSEOPHdotCOMdotPH is wondering if Google understand other language: Does Google understand other foreign languages? (source) [...]