Ookaboo Introduces Multilingual Search
Paul Houle
Ookaboo's rich metadata has long promised the ability to improve search results, and this week, we're taking advantage of it. Ookaboo now accepts query terms in foreign languages and uses query expansion to, often, get good results.
[Follow the link above to see an embedded graphic showing the results of a search for "Tokyo" using Japanese Kanji]
The effectiveness of multilingual search depends on our availability of information about a particular topic; it's particularly effective if you're looking for an topic that is inside the zone where people use the language that you're using, and some languages are better represented than others -- right now it's quite good at looking up Japanese things in Japanese and for looking up things in the Arabic cultural zone in Arabic. (Search for بغداد to find Baghdad, the capital of Iraq.)
We've located additional sources of topic names in a number of languages and will soon be expanding the range of languages we accept and the topics represented.