Ever since discovering Karen Spärck Jones and learning more about her, I’ve been reading a lot about information retrieval and natural language processing – especially as it relates to search engines. As I researched, I started to wonder about other languages. What about search engines for people who solely speak Spanish? Hindi? French? And even Russian! Are there gaps in efficiency & quality of these search engines compared to those in English, the world’s most widely spoken language? And if so, do any languages suffer more, and why?
I dug a bit more into widely used Russian search engines, out of curiosity. Apparently, the three most widely used ones are Yandex, Google.ru, and Rambler, listed in order of their popularity. I’ll focus on Yandex (or Яндекс, in Russian) in particular.
