Google starting to deal in a proper way with inflected languages such as Icelandic by stripping away the grammar. Icelandic users have had to put up with the search engine’s illiteracy by entering their searches in various cases, numbers, genders, tenses and then do it all over again with the definite article and so on. The only thing I can say now is Google welcome to the wonderful world of inflected languages. I will be following up on this shortly with a more indept article, so look out.
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Kristjan Mar Hauksson
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2-3 years ago it wasn’t supported at all. Now it understands inclensions and conjugations pretty well. The same is with Russian. German Google AFAIK became morphologically-aware even earlier. Of course, German and Russian have much bigger audience than Icelandic. In fact, I agree that this is a very respectable move. Just making a small clarification: Google starts dealing with “small” inflected languages.
I am not sure how supported Russian has been. The point was rather the respect Google is showing small languages by doing this.
Well, Russian and German are also flexional 🙂 Russian is supported for about 2 years, German somewhat longer.
An article writen by Olafur Kr. Olafsson at Optimiseyourweb.com called “Google, are you learning Icelandic?” explains this actually also quite well. you can read it here: http://www.optimizeyourweb.com/index.php/2008/03/22/google-are-you-learning-icelandic/