NOTE: The following is the beginning of an article I published with Multilingual Magazine recently. You can read the full article at the link below (free registration required).
Twenty years ago, Yahoo! was the world’s leading search engine.
It had launched its first localized website, for Japan, 1996 and had expanded to, at the time, an impressive 13 languages, making Yahoo! one of the world’s most-visited websites.
But there was an upstart search engine on the rise, taking global expansion to an entirely new level. By the end of 2004 this search engine supported 67 languages and had quickly surpassed Yahoo! in market share.
That search engine was Google.
Google pioneered a number of web globalization best practices that are with us even today – best practices that have stood the test of time.
For the past 20 years I have benchmarked the websites of the leading global brands, resulting in the annual Web Globalization Report Card. These reports have identified new and established best practices, as well as emerging trends. And when I look back over the past twenty years, a few best practices resonate as strongly today as they did back then. This article highlights a few of these time-tested best practices.
The Internet in 2004
First of all, it’s important to understand that back in 2004, there were only 750 million internet users on the planet, the majority of whom were native-English speakers. A company could launch an English-language website confident that a majority of internet users could understand it. But the internet was growing exponentially as well as multilingually. Companies with global aspirations knew that a multilingual internet would over the long term be essential to global success.
It’s also important to understand that the infrastructure supporting global websites was still in its infancy. At the time, websites typically varied encodings based on the languages they supported. Remember ISO-8859-1? But the evolution of Unicode (UTF-8) offered a character encoding that supported the world’s major scripts and languages, allowing for more scalable web and software development. Google benefited greatly from Unicode as did the companies that followed, such as Facebook. And scalability was a major reason why Google, from day one, relied on global templates.
Click here to read the article (free registration required).
