Just what the world needs — two more URL shorteners. Google now has goo.gl. And Facebook has FB.me. But Google’s URL jumps out at me because it marks the first instance of Greenland (.gl) being used as a “countryless country…
For a Westerner like myself, the most-popular Korean portals Naver and Daum are a maze of text and images. The pages are too busy, too distracting. But I’m not the intended user. Google Korea, as I mentioned in 2007, has…
I just noticed that the book I wrote several years ago Beyond Borders: Web Globalization Strategies is now up on Google Books. I appears though that Google still has a thing or two to learn about scanning covers…
Bing recently added a nifty new translation feature — one that is so simple and in many ways so obvious that I can’t help wondering why Google never got around to doing it. But that’s a topic for a later…
Google marches ahead with its machine translation engine, adding Turkish, Thai, Hungarian, Estonian, Albanian, Maltese, and Galician. This time last year, Google supported a mere 13 languages, which was in itself not bad. But I particularly like the minor tweaks…
Inspired by our Country Codes of the World map, I developed a smaller version that includes the ccTLDs currently in use by Google for its local search engines. As you can see here, Google has quite a few ccTLDs in…
Is it just me or does the new Google Chrome icon remind you of the old Simon game of the 1980s. Yes, I know I’m dating myself here, but I do see a resemblance…
It’s not much, but it’s a start. Basically, Google says you don’t necessarily have to register a country code for each country Web site (though it certainly helps). But if you can’t get a ccTLD, at least be sure to…
Google announced that they now have 30 products available in 30 languages. And many of these products, such as Gmail and Adwords, now support 40 languages. Here is a graph they published of the rate of growth of their language…
Google features a 4th of July logo at Google.com today. This is not all that unusual; Google has been doing this for several years now. But there is an inherent flaw in hosting an American visual at Google.com: The .com…
I tried to login to Google Adwords recently and was met with the following “temporarily unavailable” Web page: The page illustrates one of the many the challenges of managing a Web site that supports so many languages. Even something supposedly…
There are tons of articles about Google vs. Baidu, but few of these articles take an in-depth look at how Google compares to Baidu from a Chinese user’s perspective. In this article, I do just that, and I render a…
This comes via my brother via Blogoscoped — Google has made interesting use of the Iceland country code to create a URL that packs a narrative: Check out out here: www.google.is