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In Some Places, Local Search Beating Google
babooo404 points out Newsweek coverage of Google focusing on areas in which the search giant may be vulnerable. In some countries outside the US, local competition is handing Google its head. In South Korea a company called Naver dominates. And in Russia, portal site Yandex leads in both search and advertising. In the Cyrillic language market Google is a distant third in search, and Yandex is trouncing Google in the advertising arena by 70% to 2%.
How some people treat everything "Google" as if it were special. It would be news worth *if* Google was beating local searches in foreign areas.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Why not rip out the guts of some p2p file sharing system and instead of files transfer links around. Search would find relevant articles instead of files. NYTimes is doing some pretty cool stuff with semantic journalism but nobody is taking advantage of it yet. If you took ID3 and applied it to articles it would be a good start. I founded a startup and we're trying to do something better than Google news for specific locations. Think Digg+Local+Slashdot comments. Nobody is really thinking about geography very hard but it's a fundamental core thing you need to get right before you can build a good local search engine. Pitching the idea to some VCs Wednesday, can't sleep for some reason :)
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
Considering Google could at most have 170 million people using it in China (and the likelihood is that it has significantly less as not all of China's 1 billion people would use the internet) worth the morals of Google's leadership? I guess the answer is yes. I know everyone has a price, but considering how many people use Google worldwide, its quite sad that Google's price is an extra 170 million pairs of eyes.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
Still, Yandex is unbelievable crap - results-quality wise. I'd say Top3 go in reverse in this parameter. But the problem I think - apart from advertising (Y had a rather big ad campaign some time ago) - is that Google seriously dropped the ball and showed huge negligence and ignorance when entering local market unprepared - for example, their engine did not even search for different wordforms and Russian of course has an ultra-developed word endings system. So - at first - Google was 99% useless. Plus - Y had been around the longest and most people simply don't care about switching.
Perhaps in the West, we often assume that Google is the only player in town worth using.
It would be interesting to get the view of someone in South Korea, for instance, as to how useful Google is to them when compared with local/regional alternatives?
It's more than likely that Google is far too orientated around the West, both culturally and in terms of results.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
We cannot stand for this! Google, not in domination worldwide? Quick, Google: buy them out!
Google searches you! Oh wait...
someone at google sent a memo to someone else... AT GOOGLE! story expected to be picked up by /. sports at 11.
Not surprising. Till recently Russian currency was not freely convertible.
... Oh well... size matters...
As a result, dealing with an external broker for services was too painful to contemplate. This restriction formed a protectionist barrier on any service dealing with relatively small financial transactions. As a result companies like Google were locked out off the market in favour of the local brokers.
AFAIK they have a freely convertible currency now which changes the rules of the game back in favour of Google and from there on
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
And these other search engines don't serve the interests of their stock holders?
c++;
How does Google handle all the various extended character sets out there? Can you search in Cyrillic, Chinese or even French?
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
In Korea, only old people use Google.
I honestly don't get it. I also know that in maps, they are not number one in many places.
Najdi.si in Slovenia ;)
Same reason I walk to work every day... because all damn car companies are controlled by the damn greedy stockholders.
It's 20 miles but I make it work because I'm so self-righteous.
They forgot by far the biggest non-US competitor, Chinese http://www.baidu.com/
The most would-be-shocking fact is that more than half of the non-technical people doesn't even know what google is (for example, my mom). In contrast, I find most of my non-technical friends have naver.com as their first page on IE. In Korea, it's quite common to see TV commercials say "search XYZ in Naver", instead of displaying its URL.
The biggest reason is because Naver actually hosts content, rather than just indexing content. Not only that Naver is a strong search engine company, it hosts a vast amount of blogs, forums, an online game site (Hangame), user-provided knowledge base, plus third-party licensed contents (such as dictionaries, public transportation routes, news contents provided by other medias, etc.). All these contents are prohibited to robots (via robots.txt), which means Google can't even index them. Thus, no matter how great Google's search algorithm is, it will be almost impossible to match Naver's quality.
Plus, running a homepage *that looks cool* is a very complicated job for a non tech-savvy person. Thus, they don't get webhosting - they upload contents to big portals. I've even seen many small businesses forget about homepages, and instead have a blog/user-created forum/whatsoever on every major player. It would be much easier for normal users to reach them (since memorizing a URL written in a non-native language would be painful), and cheaper (near zero) to maintain.
Another downside of Google is that it DISPLAYS English search results, which would be useless to them. Yes, people are lazy enough to select the 'Search for Korean contents only'.
In terms of actual users, I believe Google would fall even further behind (far behind 10th place), since there is another big portal cyworld (http://cyworld.com/), which provides personal blogging services and web-based communities.
I use many different searching methods
- Naver or Yahoo for local information (public transport route, looking for a place for a nice dinner, etc.)
- Wikipedia for something that's expected to exist on an encyclopedia
- danawa.com and enuri.com for searching best deals (equivalent to PriceGrabber or whatsoever)
- Naver for anything else in Korean
- Google for everything else, or if all methods above doesn't give a good enough result.
As a result, I get to use google less and wikipedia more, while naver and everything else remains somewhat constant.
Not that you would read it, but here's the print version.
Google as a trusted US brand would
allow the US gov to mess around with information in real time.
To push a fake story up or hold back a search term until the spin was ready.
But with different parts of the world using their own search technology,
the USA might have to do some real work if it wants real time information dominance.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I am student from Korea so i know very well about Korean websites. Naver gained popularity by providing human generated search engine and user generated contents such as imitation of yahoo's answer page. But there are no good search engine that supports Korean in the face of this planet. At least european laguages share common alphabet, that is the reason why google holds significant share on europe. But Korean is just different from English. As i search internet in Korean, neither google,naver returns reliable results. There are no search engine that supports basic functions like spell correction neither. (Lets say you type Koreea in google and it will suggest you that if you meant to type Korea) web portals and search engines in Korea are more like very well organized catalog with useful advertisements. There are long way to go in developing web search engine in Korean. In fact there are some progress done. Until the new technology is finally embedded into their websites it is just going to be good yellowbook with lots of ads. Funny thing is that when i use google i do my best to ignore all the ads. But when i use Naver, i only look at their ads. funnier things is tho, most scholars use google in Korea when searching Korean, because it has simpler interface.
Wait, what about the parent is flamebait?
Oh, the fact he's making an unpopular comment about the corporate flavor of the month.
It's kind of like making negative comments about Firefly, Star Wars, Star Trek or anyone who is ever (even rightfully) sued by copyright holders. You just don't voice that sort of thing here and expect to get away with it. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion -- as long as it matches everyone else's.
Big surprise, the big American company cannot compete on accuracy versus a search engine specialized on finding Norwegian results? This is surprising how exactly?
Google has good search technology, and search is automated so it doesn't really matter whether the text is Norwegian or English. In Germany Google has a market share of over 90 percent although there certainly are contenders and there is money to be made, but Google is almost a monopoly. Could be the same in Norway or Russia, but apparently isn't.
The question remains, is this a technology or a marketing issue (better search or better brand recognition)?
Cyrillic is a script, not a language. We are not speaking Latin here, do we?
Say out loud: I'm an Aspie and I'm somewhat proud, I guess. Uh. Can I write an email in all caps instead? Hm...
.. that has got to be a terribly painful experience. I saw a fish get googled once... yuuuuck!
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
All these contents are prohibited to robots (via robots.txt), which means Google can't even index them. Thus, no matter how great Google's search algorithm is, it will be almost impossible to match Naver's quality.
This could be the beginning of a slippery slope. Suppose Google responded by ignoring robots.txt files in Korea and protecting orkut, blogger and its own sites with robots.txt files that it does not obey itself. Up until now there has been an unwritten rule - something protected by robots.txt won't be indexed by any public search engine. The possible side-effect of breaking this rule is that robots.txt files are ignored, which can be a real pain for small scale interactive sites.Google beats the hell out of Yandex and Rambler where results relevance is concerned. It's just that people got used to these and don't bother to switch.
is the not allowing google or others to index them. If Google, Yahoo, MS or AOL were smart, they would deny indexing to search engines like this, until it is reciprocated.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Transferring links around isn't the hard part. The hard part is to actually get something that's relevant for that search string.
Just simple lists of keywords associated with that link won't do. We already had that kind of search engines long before Google, and there's a reason why Google handed their arse to them.
And then there are the people gaming the system for a quick profit... even if it means ruining a valuable resource for everyone else. There was an almost epidemic of link spam on all possible forums and blogs, for example, just to raise the Google rank of a couple of pages.
Most of Google's uphill battle so far has been tweaking the algorithm to defend against such "attacks".
(And now that I mention it, it dawns upon me that maybe that's why smaller national engines can do better locally. With everyone trying to game Google and generally the larger English-reading world, it could be that noone bothered polluting the smaller national searches.)
So just being able to swap links around won't do much.
A second and third problems I see with your idea are, well:
1. timing. When I search for something, I'd rather not depend on the right people being online at that exact time. I also want the answer in half a second. Google does that with in-RAM indexes. I wouldn't bet a fortune on someone doing that equally fast via several hops over the net, P2P style.
2. reliability. P2P traffic has been poisoned repeatedly by interested parties, like, say, the RIAA and MPAA. And it's entirely trivial to do so. So what's to keep other interested parties from poisoning P2P search with falsely tagged links?
Even on Google, it's not entirely rare that someone buys ad-word keywords on their competitors' trademarks or such. E.g., if you have a company called, say, "Houndwire", I could buy that keyword for an ad for my company. Now everyone who searches for your company, will have my ad served to them. Then keep my fingers crossed that if I'm in roughly the same market, some people will just go ahead and buy from me. There have been even laws proposed against that kind of impersonation.
Now for adwords it's one thing, but the same could just as well be applied to poisoning a P2P search. Which could ruin its usefulness pretty fast.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Here in Brasil Google is the best search engine. They have some good Brasilian engineers and their marketing/advertising department is pt_BR-aware, so they have good knowledge. The other search engine ("Cadê" == "where it is?") was bought by Yahoo! (That also does not really suck WRT websearch, but is no Google).
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Well there is an easy solution to that problem, just buy them and you'll be number 1.
I didn't found something funny to put here.
This is happening already..
http://www.ewhisper.net/blog/msn-ignoring-robotstxt-files/
There are ways to block search engines that do this..
http://www.ars.net/bots/
"A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it." - Churchill
At the bottom of the
Well, I'll paraphrase his post for you so that you might understand.
"Google sucks, how have you not figured this out yet? It only serves to further the interests of its stockholders.(something which may be argued about every company on the planet, how insightful) Quit talking about Google and use other search engines since Google is so obviously evil (although I have provided no insight or evidence as to why this might be the case)."
Help any?
It wouldn't surprise me if China is on this list in the near future, what with the recent action of the chinese government. Now is a good time to invest in search engines that the chinese government is not going to block...
I've had interesting problems at some Internet rooms (PC Bangs) here in Korea. Every now and then you'll see odd websites blocked by some strange sort of filtering system. The one I used to go to had Fark.com blocked, Youtube blocked, ESPN was blocked, and even Google.com was blocked. Now, google.co.kr was not blocked, and when I wanted to check my analytics page, google.com/analytics was blocked, but another google analytics page accessed by https:/// (not http:/// was available. I'm not very bright when it comes to networks (or Korean, for that matter), so I'm not sure whose fault it was, but the webpage that came up instead had a graphic that made it clear this was to protect children.
This is NOT a widespread epidemic, but it has occurred occasionally at various internet rooms around the country under different ownership (ie: not a chain). As someone else mentioned, Naver has brand strength (company commercials approach it very similarly to the way AOL used keywords), but these sorts of filtering anomalies don't hurt.
Nope. It was fairly easy to work with foreign currency in Russia since early 90-s. Yandex was simply MUCH better than Google because Google have not supported Russian morphology until very recently.
...
For example, if I'm searching information about, say, the name of Putin's dog I can use the following search query:
"Imja sobaki Putina" - (the name of Putin's dog) and Yandex can find documents with the words
"Imena sobak Putina" - (the names of Putin's dogs - note the plural) or documents with the words
"Imen sobak Putina" - ([about] the names of Putin's dogs)
"Imena sobakam Putina" - another grammar case.
Russian morphology is MUCH MUCH more complex than in English. Yandex started working on morphological search in 1996, so it's not surprising that it's still much better than Google.
..engine searches YOU
In Soviet Russia, Google searches you!
And it's been like this since 2004/05. Although there are local portals that provide search engines, none of them can match Google results - counting those in Serbian. A few months ago, Google incorporated a Serbian Home page, a move that will only cement its position.
But, I believe that the main reason for its success is in the fact that, although Cyrillic is the official alphabet, more than 80% of all content is written in a local variation of Latin alphabet(without the q,y,x,w and with 5 additional letters).
Magazine 13 - We like to think its funny... sort of
Those are called "areas of potential growth." That's business.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
In keeping with the rest of this thread, how could this post possibly be modded off topic, let alone be the only post in the thread modded as such? It's a direct response to a question presented by the parent post which is, itself, not modded as off topic.
Not even going to post as AC for this because it's so absurd.
Interesting point... Never thought about that but it makes a lot of sense.
It is a matter of approach to morphology actually.
IIRC Google approach to morphology as a whole is to throw brute force statistical analysis at it. They use statistical models and loads of data for translation. This works wonders with languages like English who have more exemptions than grammar rules while having fairly rigid sentence ordering and relatively limited common vocabulary.
Russian is very difficult to be subjected to this approach. Due to it undergoing a forced language reform at the turn of the 20th century, russian grammar can be expressed in less than 10 pages of strict rules with around 30-40 exemptions. This grammar used to be drilled down with vengeance in Russian schools so it has not changed a bit since formulated 100 years ago.
While the rules are strict (and relatively easy) the meaning of many key grammar elements is positional-dependant. To add insult to injury it has one of the largest working day-to-day vocabularies and there are probably more ways to say the same thing than in any other language (I mean proper Russian, not "Na huja zhe tebe eto nado blad'"..
So no wonder an analytical model is more successful than statistical. Thanks for pointing it out.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
It's sort of a coward comparassion: ANY language has more complex morphology than English.
If you really want to talk about why local beats global look at the innovations they are creating. Kvasir is just a boring and very plain search engine.
However if you look at the fantastic Sesam.no they have some great services that beat Google. A search for a name will give you a combination of actual phonebook data, blogs, newspaper articles, addresses, maps, driving directions and even their corporate roles and stock ownership. And not to mention actual *knowledge* of local geography and language. It helps that Norway is a very transparent society where information is free, public and available.
The user interface is not enough, just supporting non-English languages is easy - actually using it is hard.
In Mother Russia the internet searches you.
You can't take the sky from me...
You can't take the sky from me...
I do not like and do not trust Yandex.ru because they mix in paid for ads into the search results without identifying them as such.
You can't handle the truth.
It's 20 miles but I make it work because I'm so self-righteous. GM bought tramway companies just to shut them so so you'd HAVE to drive to work.
The big three had a major influence in the development of sprawl suburbs, so you'd HAVE to drive to work.
There probably wouldn't be an obesity epidemic if walking to work was a viable option for most people.
You can't take the sky from me...
This is newsworthy because it seems that Google is less popular in areas with more high-tech wireless devices. Maybe I'm stereotyping tech cultures but Google (or no American company) has a great wireless presensce like many Asian and European companies do. Google is late to the game as far as wireless aps go so they need to convince users to move from what has been working well on the cellphone to Google. Might this be part of the Gphone (rumor) strategy to capture wireless user markets around the globe. If Google can put together a remarkable wireless suite then folks will switch or folks won't leave Google when competing software is created.
I would like to see these 10 pages of "strict rules". As far as I know, no such thing exists for any natural language and certainly not or Russian.
The "useless" google is your friend:
http://www.ipmce.su/~lib/osn_prav.html
I used to have a "legit" version at my old house (no access to it at the mo) which was printed by Moscow State. It was 35-40 pages in total with the preface and the contents.
By the way, when I taught Russian in the USA nearly 20 years ago I had that trimmed to 10 pages for the beginners.
The problem I found with it is that most English students of foreign languages are humanity students which are heavily into memorising and not trying to use rules and logic. They can memorise any number of phrases, the most obscure lexics, etc but they cannot memorise and use formal grammar. At all. As a result they have no problem with French, Spanish, etc but with Russian they hit a wall and run away screaming that it is too hard.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
You do realize that it is illegal for a publically traded company not to serve the interests of its shareholders, right?
Think before you type. Think.
Ride the skies
"Locks keep honest people honest." robots.txt is simply a lock. Google could break it at any time. Do you believe the CIA or Israeli Mossad (sp?) are obeying robots.txt? They all are trying to find other's content.
The grandparent's post is comparing Google's service to South Korea's Naver. Google is a search aggregator only; it doesn't create or host its own content. Naver does host content, for South Koreans.
Search aggregators, like Google, can't exist without content providers. In most cases, it's faster to go straight to the known source, the provider. In this case, it's Naver.
Nope, you're thinking about Russian grammar in the sense 'how to write without grammatic mistakes'. Yes, it's not really hard - English spelling, for example, is much more erratic.
On the other hand, correct machine analysis of Russian is very hard. Rulesets are nowhere close to 10 printed pages, and a lot of things is so context-sensitive that it's not even possible to do correct analysis. I briefly worked at NLP (Natural Language Processing) area, but cowardly fled it - too much pain for not much gain.
I can't believe anyone would write this summary without mentioning Baidu.
Baidu is killing Google in the mainland Chinese market. Despite serious corruption (pay-for-placement extortion schemes + bowing before the Chinese censors), all of the Chinese I've talked to say Baidu consistently returns better results than Google.
Bullshit-in Nihon, if you speak the language correctly with the right accent as well as you can, it's considered a gesture of friendship.
You obviously haven't been to Nihon.
Try it out. The UI is just as good (improved from previous version when Google was better) but the mapping is just better. Live search will automatically alter your route based on traffic conditions. The 45 degree angle shots are way superior to Google's overhead images. The only thing I'd ding Live search for is that SOMETIMES the screen re-drawing is slower. Not sure why. Any ideas from an AJAX expert?
However, those are just "main rules". I believe that the most common rules can be listed in
30 pages or so. However this is far from the complete description of the Russian grammar (if such thing exists at all).
Google's search results are getting worse and worse by the day.
Every damned search I do is filled with ads, bogus pages, and duplicated content.
Not to mention Google's annoying bias for Wikipedia and, of course, YouTube.
I for one will be glad when Google collapses (I give it 2 years before it's a steaming pile, and the stock crashes).
It used to be that people would try different search engines to see which one was the best.
Now people simply set the default to Google, out of practice, and follow along like sheep.
I would suspect that this is language related. Even though most countries now days are global, scouring through billions of pieces of data is difficult to do in one language let alone another with completly seperate characters. Google would be wise to open offices in other countries and hire locals to compete with these other companies rather than a bunch of 18 year olds out of berkeley.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
Now, that's informative. Thanks.
I've beaten my head against the wall numerous times in the past trying to learn a foreign language and always failed miserably. I'm a smart guy, but I've been told over and over that only an idiot can't learn Spanish. Well, then I guess I'm an idiot.
So what's the best way for a complete noob to start learning Russian, short of formal classes? At this stage of life, I'll need to be self-taught (at least for a while).
If you apply any kind of analytical model in a generic search engine like Google, you increase recall at the expense of precision, certainly for pages that don't explicitly encode their language. My big problem now with using search engines like Google is the ambiguity between last names (spears) and acronyms (owl) on the one hand, and normal words I am searching for. Applying morphological rules makes this problem even worse.
I once saw a demonstration of an experimental search engine for (Dutch) historical documents that, besides applying some morphological rules, also applied phonetic chain shifts and changes in orthography backwards. This works quite well for Dutch (orthography changes by government decree and, as the English Wikipedia article puts it, "Dutch orthography has the reputation of being particularly logical") and makes even Middle Dutch documents properly searchable. Of course it was applied to a specific corpus of old legal material.
Google is already quite mediocre at telling apart Dutch pages from pages in other northwestern European languages, and the more rules you add to generate alternative word forms, the crappier it will become as the number of alternative explanations for a certain word form increases and the search engine can no longer tell, based on its analytical model alone, whether a page with little text is for instance English, Dutch, or Danish.
On the basis of statistical argument it is obviously quite easy to decide that a page is more likely to be modern English than historical Dutch, and it is also statistically more likely that I am searching for Britney Spears than the plural of spear, but if Google goes to far with applying rules, at some point I will no longer be able to find the spear because of Spears.
This is less of a problem with languages that require a specific alphabet (which provides useful metadata), or with associated populations that are largely monolingual and mainly use software localized for their own market, than with languages like Dutch that make use of digraphs instead of diacritics, use any character set that includes a-z indiscrimately, and often use English-only software, or software with locale set to US English.
Oh, the fact he's making an unpopular comment about the corporate flavor of the month. I've noticed most flamebait posts on Slashdot actually make a valid point, however, the point is lost within a sea of comments that can start flamewars. So repeating common points that "Google is Evil, M$ is Evil, Apple fanbois are lu$ers" will certainly earn you a flamebait tag as it really does not help support your argument, and instead, will turn the thread quickly into something commonly found on Digg.
If someone really feels that Google is evil, they should take the time to spell out why they feel it is evil in the post rather than making that assertion with no facts to back it up. I've even noticed a growing trend here on Slashdot - yes, this very same Slashdot - to challenge baseless anti-Microsoft comments and articles, which was unheard of up until a few months ago.
The downside to the moderation here is that a lot of people do not understand the purpose of negative moderation, thus resort to using -1 Flamebait and -1 Troll on comments that they do not agree with. Those moderations should be saved for comments that have a malicious intent; comments meant to insult rather than contribute. (This does not mean that all insulting comments are flamebait.) So rather than moderating a comment down to Troll, Overrated, or Flamebait, they should instead reply to the comment as to why they disagree with its content.
As for the parent post, interestingly enough, they had one line that was relevant to the article: There are other search engines out there. Pick a few and try them out. Everything else was about how awful Google is without mentioning anything specific.
Another poster, ceeam, said this about Yandex, but was instead moderated Informative: Still, Yandex is unbelievable crap The difference between a flamebait and an informative post? Everything after that first line in ceeam's post was related to why they feel Yandex is unbelievable crap and related that to the article's topic of Google getting beaten out in local markets.
I'll stop here - I feel like I'm beating a dead horse.
Best "String" Ever!
Bzzzt. I just got back from Nihon, and I speak it almost perfectly. Stop talking out of your ass. I can't stand stupid Gai-Jin.
Let me educate you. If you speak Nihongo perfectly, or close to perfection, it's a gesture of friendship to the Nihon-Jin.
Get a clue, thanks.
I find it very interesting that this discussion is pointing out linguistic anomalies that are tripping Google up. If Google is looking for a linguist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguist, I'll volunteer ;>
It seems clear from other posts that morphology is important (particularly in Russian), but what about other Linguistic concepts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_basic_linguistic_topics ? Might any of these help a company attempting to do semantic searching using language?
I have to assume Google has considered this (because they have so many Ph.Ds), but to what extent? My coursework with Speech Recognition and Voice Interfaces showed that most of the current companies use very little linguistics and rely very heavily on neural networks. I hope Google is doing better than that. In fact, if I were running Google, I'd make a basic overview of linguistics required "reading" for employees who work with the search engine. The semantics field, especially, has some valuable insights into how we humans put meaning into language.
I don't know what you're talking about. Most of the times I use both Yandex and Google for searches in russian, and Yandex have been providing better results consistently over the last years. Again, Google's abilities to process russian texts are surprisingly miniscule (surprise comes from the fact that Sergey Brin is russian, could've known better).
That's not my experience. Really, you have to play it by ear when you are given coments like that. When you can speak a language very fluently, it usually does really mean that the person is surprised at how well you can speak the language. (And it gets pretty damn annoying after a while.)
Are you adequate?
As I had never heard of these two portals, being an English speaking American, I googled Yandex and Naver. Interesting websites, but I could not read them. So I used Google to translate the pages into English. Found a nice photo gallery on Naver as well as some comic strips, and Yandex told me a story about how they busted some Chinese restaraunts in Moscow for substituting Dog for Lamb, and another story from Argentina about how "the woman became the man" (I actually knew what they were refering to here as I read the story earlier on NBC).
Of course, it would have been much easier for me to just pull up the English newspapers from Moscow or St. Petersburg (I actually used to get RSS feeds from them, should probably set that up again, those were fun).
The point isn't whether it is news. The point is that is shouldn't be news.
Are you adequate?
What's your basis for claiming this? I live in a majority/minority county of the USA, with a 45% foreign-born population, and I see plenty of US-born, "white" Americans get impatient and annoyed at all those people who can't speak English good 'round these parts.
I think the separation you wish us to conceive between the image of ethnic groups and the image of their languages is artificial, too.
The USA is nowhere near as varied as even England, much less Europe. (Maybe you do need to travel to see the world.)
*ROFL*
Yeah, right. Not going to happen. We'll end up just with a bigger bunch of Anglo-Americans who took some Spanish in high school, and can do nothing with it beyond racist jokes that they think are clever.
Spanish is widely regarded as a "low" language in the USA. As long as this is true, there is a major sociolinguistic impediment to large numbers of non-Hispanics learning much Spanish.
Are you adequate?
www.baidu.com I believe is far more popular in China than Google.
"But if you speak a little Japanese, even though it is broken,
then people feel very close to you and try to be friendly to you."
http://www.geocities.co.jp/Berkeley-Labo/6160/
The only reason you got modded up was because most slashdotters don't know about Nihon-so they rely on someone propgating ignorance instead. Slashdot mod points do not necessaily reflect reality, which you failed today.
Bakayarou
It's 20 miles but I make it work because I'm so self-righteous. GM bought tramway companies just to shut them so so you'd HAVE to drive to work.
The big three had a major influence in the development of sprawl suburbs, so you'd HAVE to drive to work.
There probably wouldn't be an obesity epidemic if walking to work was a viable option for most people. Moderation 0
50% Troll
50% Insightful
Learn what your choices mean before moderating, people:
A Troll is similar to Flamebait, but slightly more refined. This is a prank comment intended to provoke indignant (or just confused) responses. A Troll might mix up vital facts or otherwise distort reality, to make other readers react with helpful "corrections." Trolling is the online equivalent of intentionally dialing wrong numbers just to waste other people's time.
You can't take the sky from me...
Who cares about Russia? There are 140M (mostly poor) people(1) and 26K Internet users(2). Even if the other big countries of the former Soviet Union should be considered, the amount of the relevant Internet users would not raise significantly. It would be difficult for Google or whichever US-based corporation to make a breakthrough in Russia as most people there consider not using US services as an important way to emboss the power of the own tragic country. Unfortunately, I have to say this based on own experience. ----- 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia 2. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/rs.html
xoda.org
Why you were modded "insightful" is interesting, because I can Google lots of sites that go against your assumption. You might deserve a "2" or a "3" but you aren't THAT insightful.
:-)). --- In this case, I recommend you to stick to a few phrases and master the precise tonal accents."
"In a meeting with Japanese people, you can impress them by a few words of your perfect-sounding Japanese and pretend to be a big admirer of the Japanese culture. (I hope you are one anyway
http://www.mech.titech.ac.jp/~h-souzou/welcome/Japanese%5B2%5D.html
There are others...
Read the GP. I said used to have one in a proper book (I now live 2000 miles away from my old house so I cannot get the book to hit you with the ISBN on the head). It was printed by Moscow State University. sub-50 pages A5 hardcover out of which the rules themselves were under 20.
This is not surprising - modern Russian is an artificial language. It was artificially simplified with the entire grammar and spelling revised to make it fit a set of written rules in the early 1900-es. Same for Bulgarian (circa 1920).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
You are quite correct that Russian grammar was simplified after the revolution. However, I am still very doubtful that a _complete_ list of grammar rules exists for Russian (or any other language).
After all, it is not too hard construct sentences, which some (but not all) speakers will deem grammatical.
Gawd do people know f*** history any more !?! It is really Gobels is right that a lie repeated 100 times becomes the ultimate truth.
The simplification after the revolution is a f*** propaganda BS (introduced personally by one of my own great grandfathers by the way). The so called "Lenin gave us the alphabet" BS which you can still hear in a few places. Yuck... The daft bugger was far out at the time with 3rd stage syphilis that he could not give anything besides grunting noises and dripping saliva...
The reform was conceived and started before WW1. If you take WW1 pictures of Petrograd (yep, _not_ St Petersburgh) especially ones which are not from a Soviet archive you will see the new spelling along with the old. All the bolshies did was to go through and finish it off.
By the way, in their blind copying of everything Soviet the Bulgarians tried to do the same history alteration exercise. They tried to erase from the history books the fact that the language reform of 1920-1922 was conceived before WW1 and based on Russian _pre-soviet_ example and executed by the Stambolijski government and the military coup that succeeded it simply made it non-mandatory (but did not repeal it). At least they have fixed this lie now and their history books say that the reform was done there and then, following Russian example and the BG bolshies just put back the "mandatory" in it.
I am not profficient enough in Serbian history, but I would not be surprised if a similar event happened there. Need to ask actually...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Interestingly enough "Comprehensive spelling reform aimed at mass literacy was one of the first acts of the democratic provisional government in the 1917 Revolution" according to http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozideas/wrussref.htm, so my statement seems to be correct.
Of course, you are right that Bolsheviks took a lot of credit for the reform.
Btw, I think that Lenin became incapacitated in 1922-1923, not earlier. Certainly, around 1920 he was very active.
Useful to hear what search engines are dominating locally. The blinkers on what's happening in non-english speaking countries comes with the territory, not just on the Internet but on the awareness of literature, movies, films etc.
... it [Russian] has one of the largest working day-to-day vocabularies and there are probably more ways to say the same thing than in any other language [citation needed]