Google translating search results
This morning, while discussing some issues with one of my German SEO colleagues, I was searching for [flug amsterdam] in google.de (if you know me you guess which client that was for). At the bottom of the SERP, I saw this:
Basically, this is Google offering me, the user, to translate the search term into english. When you click this link, you'll get a SERP for "flight amsterdam", where it shows the SERP translated in German on the left, and the original SERP on the right (click for enlargement):
I'm curious as to how Google decides to put this in... I'll be trying to figure out with our analytics staff here how many traffic we get off of these translated searches.
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Google released this last year as Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR). Not surprisingly it's based on Google's translate service (which isn't that good in my opinion - maby that's why this feature isn't rolled out heavily yet?).
CLIR is in my opinion a logical step in Google's Universal Search, because it will extend the searchable information in non-english countries. And I believe the most content online is english. It's a highly interesting development if this feature is integrated more into the SERP's.
I wrote about it in Dutch, let's see how CLIR/Google translate does the job ;-)
English translation of Dutch article
I think things just add up, and this is just the beginning, don't forget about their mission