Evaluating Google queries based on language preferences

Abstract

This paper evaluates the assumption that users expect search engines to retrieve the same results for queries regardless of the language or the location of the originator. The dependency of the Google search engine on the language and location from which the query is submitted has been evaluated. The most popular queries in Arabic language were selected and translated into English for comparison using the Google translator. When studying keyword traffic on both Google search based keyword tool and Google Insights for Search, results showed that 67% of the Arab Internet users prefer to use English queries instead of their Arabic counterpart. When studying Google responses to some popular queries we have found that Google ranking algorithm depends on the language of the query more than on the keyword popularity. Although results justify search engines' favouritism of giving documents in English priority over those of other languages, nonetheless, future search engine indexers should separate the document language from its content in a structure that makes the language a pluggable attribute for those indexed documents.

Googling Trends in Conservation Biology

“…A thoughtful selection and thorough consideration of keywords apropos of a research question, cultural heritage, and regional differences are therefore the most fundamental steps in this analytical approach (Al-Eroud et al 2011;Al-Kabi et al 2012). Once the keywords associated with a particular biological process are defined, temporal and spatial trends for a region can be validated by the governmental agencies or research laboratories that own the data.…”

Content-based analysis to detect Arabic web spam

“…During the collection of web pages, the authors have relied on Google top searches in the Arab world presented by Al-Eroud et al [31] Examples of such words include ‘Facebook’ (فيس بوك), words of ‘songs’ (أغاني), ‘chat’ (دردشه, شات), ‘YouTube’ (يوتيوب), and ‘games’ (العاب). The researchers of [28] used the ‘Google Insights for Search’ web page to obtain the top searches (keywords) in the Arab world; these were used in this study as seeds to collect the spam web pages.…”

“…It is an example of content-based web spam in Arabic; the content contains Arabic words beside some meaningless English words generated by pressing the same keys holding the Latin letters of the keyboard used to display the Arabic word. Table 1 shows the number of retrieved pages for some of the Arabic queries [31] that were used to build the Arabic web spam dataset.…”

Human Thermal Conditions and North Europeans’ Web Searching Behavior (Google Trends) on Mediterranean Touristic Destinations

“…This is an indication that the effect of the rising PET value on the searching frequency is almost simultaneous. The selection of Google data gave the research some unique advantages, because using this web service, individuals are able to search without any intervention, instructions or prompts, thus the recorded responses and reactions are most likely spontaneous [47,[49][50][51][52][53][54][55].…”