Inside Search
The official Google Search blog
The World’s Languages in Your Pocket (No Internet Required)
March 27, 2013
Have you ever found yourself in a foreign country, wishing you knew how to say "I'm lost!" or "I'm allergic to peanuts”? The Internet and services like Google Translate can help—but what if you don't have a connection?
Today we're launching offline language packages for
Google Translate on Android
(2.3 and above) with support for fifty languages, from French and Spanish to Chinese and Arabic.
You can select [Offline Languages] in the app menu to see all the offline language packages available for download. To enable offline translation between any two languages, you just need to select them in the offline languages menu. Once the packages are downloaded, you're good to go.
While the offline models are less comprehensive than their online equivalents, they are perfect for translating in a pinch when you are traveling abroad with poor reception or without mobile data access.
So go out and explore another language or another culture without worrying about Internet access. There’s a whole world offline out there.
Posted by Minqi Jiang, Associate Product Manager
Billions of times a day in the blink of an eye
March 1, 2013
Ask a question, get an answer. But what happens in between? Last year we released an
animated site
that illustrates an email's journey to friends and family around the world. Today we're releasing a similar website called
How Search Works
.
Here you can follow the entire life of a search query, from the web, to crawling and indexing, to algorithmic ranking and serving, to fighting webspam. The site complements existing resources, including this blog,
the help center
,
user forums
,
Webmaster Tools
, and in-depth
research papers
.
A few things you'll find:
An interactive, graphical explanation of Google Search
A view into major search algorithms and features
A 43-page document explaining how we evaluate our results
A live slideshow of spam as we remove it
Graphs illustrating the spam problem and how we fight it
A list of policies that explain when we'll remove content
We hope the
site
helps to illuminate the split-second journey from algorithms to answers. The animated site is available today in English and there's also a text-only version in 43 languages.
Posted by
Jake Hubert
, Product Manager
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