be careful squeezed of hands
Originally uploaded by mimbrava.

You know what I love about this sign? Obviously there's just the hilarious "huh?" factor that comes with translations gone awry. But what makes it even better is that despite the amusing and imperfect word choice, you really can tell what it means.

That photo illustrates a fundamental problem we've been working on: your access to information is limited to the language(s) that you know. If you can't read English, you can't make use of more than half of the web's information. For example, a searcher in Germany can only access less than 10% of the web in German. At the same time--and not surprisingly--the growth of most new web info is happening in countries like China, where content has been almost doubling for each of the past three years.

At Yahoo! Search our goal is to make all of the world's knowledge available to everyone, regardless of language. With that in mind, we've developed Yahoo! Search Translation Technology (ok, that is a mouthful), and I'm excited to announce that we're releasing a beta product powered by this technology on Yahoo! Search Germany - Yahoo! Suche Translator.

So what does this really mean? We apply our Yahoo! Search Translation Technology by taking your query, looking across the entire Web and across languages to assemble the most comprehensive set of relevant results, and then returning that information in your local language. The underlying translation is powered by Systran, just like our famous Babelfish translation service.

When you want the most comprehensive set of results that supplements your local-language information with relevant global results, that's when the power of our technology really kicks in. Check it out for yourself (Achtung! It does help to know some German, but no worries if you don't-Yahoo! Search Translation Technology will be coming to a country near you soon):

• Have some health questions? Try "Alternativen zur Nierendialyse" (alternatives to kidney dialysis): with Search Translator you go from just 1 result to another 140K pertinent results that are translated back to your local language!
• Taking a vacation and looking for places to eat? Search for "bestes vegetarisches restaurant in San Francisco": see a 32,000x increase in relevant results, including those directly from San Francisco and the local City Search tourist guides.
• Or looking for some good recipes? How about "Rezept Ingwer-Kuchen" (ginger cake recipes): a greater variety of recipes from around the world!

And yes, you will run into the "squeezed of hands" results--it is, after all, a machine translation. But we're on it-the technology is still in its early days, and we're working on improving the quality of translations and range of languages we support over time.

As this is launching with our German brethren, I'm also excited to announce the launch of Yahoo! Search Blog auf Deutsch which will be at http://ysearchblog.com/de/. Keep up with our German-specific progress there and get to know our international team!

So play with Search Translator. Try a bunch of searches. Tell us when it's helpful, when it's not, and when it just gives you a good laugh. Share your ideas about how we can make it better. Give us a sign.

Lesley Kao
Sr. Product Manager
Yahoo! Search

PS: Want more of those signs? Check out one of my favorite Flickr groups: http://www.flickr.com/groups/engrish/