| dc.description.abstract | Abstract.
In this article, we explored the capabilities of search engines
for non-English languages. As a test case, we considered four
languages: Russian, French, Hungarian and Hebrew. For
each of these languages we tested three general search
engines: Alta Vista, FAST and Google and some local search
engines. Our results indicate that in the examined cases the
general search engines ignore the special characteristics of
non-English languages, and sometimes they do not even
handle diacritics well. These findings are rather disturbing,
since for example Google is very popular in non-English
speaking countries as well, and users are either not aware
of what they miss when using search tools that do not take
into account the structure and the special characteristics of
the specific language or have no alternatives but to use these
search engines.
Keywords: diacritics; inflections; morphological
analysis; non-English languages; pre- and postfixes;
search engines | en_US |
