How Does a Search Engine Know the Script of Key Phrases?

Google's Character Mapping

At first wishing you all a Happy and Prosperous New Year, 2008!

This is Amit Mishra on Behalf of E-Campaigners' SEO Blog, writing on Search Engine Technology for Various Language Scripts.

Promoting a website for Google.com has become an outdated practice as Google is exploring local markets and giving more importance to the regions and their regional types. Google's Global Perspective has been dimmed and all its technological efforts are constantly supporting various regions. Though the reputation of English as the Global Language is still unhampered, yet the problem arises when we think about the languages that do not use Latin Scripts. Just guess how technology will deal with Devnagari Scripts or Chinese Scripts or Japanese Scripts!

But this is not possible on my part to discuss here rather I would prefer to exploit this issue and provide some insights to the needy webmasters and SEO professionals who toil so hard to get the web pages on top of SERPs.

Google always gives importance to its users than the webmasters who mostly rely on search engines and similar tools to manage their business. The only relationship that Search Engines like Google have with internet users is the "Key Phrases". You know the rest of the things better! :)

But when somebody types key phrases in any other script apart from Latin, then how search engines deal with it! Another question that comes to my mind is how search engines do differentiate between Latin Script and Devnagari Script?

Choosing the right character set for your web page might mean that it is easier for a search engine to understand what language your page is in, though there are also other ways that it might be able to determine that.

The webmasters, who manage their business locally, too prefer to use regional scripts in HTML for websites. So how this correspondence is set among Search Engines, Users and Websites? Don't you think this could be better issue to advocate here? But one thing is confirmed that the web pages have better chance to rank if they consist of such Non-Latin Scripts similar to the searched query.

Recently Google has featured four patent documents that deal with this aspect of World Wide Web. SEOByTheSea.com mentions this in this way, "handling of language uncertainty in processing search queries and searches over the web, where the queries and documents can be expressed in any one of a number of different languages."

So in near future this could be an interesting and useful strategy to promote websites that do depend on local search (more importantly in regional script) to do business.

Thanks for you pain to chase the lines so far.

I'm Amit Mishra on Behalf of E-Campaigners' SEO Blog Signing Out.

See you next time, right on this blog with some more interesting information from search engine world.

Till then Good Bye!