Geek talk: Solving search problems in Asia

(Second of two parts)

MANILA, Philippines - In geek terms, how do you solve a problem like Asia? The world’s largest continent has roughly 3.3 billion people, over 50 countries and territories, thousands of languages and dialects, and is home to 44 percent of the world’s Internet population.

There’s probably no end to innovations that tech companies can introduce to make the Web a much easier space to navigate and make information available outside the English language realm.

“There is too much Asia and she is too old,” Rudyard Kipling once wrote. Navigating the unexplored spaces and nuances of this continent is both an extremely difficult challenge and an opportunity for the world’s biggest search engine.

“What is exciting for everyone in the region,” said Jessica Powell, Google’s communications and public affairs director for JAPAC (Japan plus Asia-Pacific), at the opening of the Science of Search Conference in Tokyo recently, “is that as the Web develops increasingly the way we use or develop, technology is going to be influenced by people in your country and the core of this is Web search.”

Adam Smith, Google director for product management in the Asia-Pacific, said they often get asked how people in Asia search differently than those in other parts of the world.

“In many ways, our searches are the same, whether you are searching for celebrity gossip, the phone number of a hot new restaurant, the schedule for the World Cup,” he said. “So we asked ourselves, why can’t users in Asia have a search experience that is as comprehensive and as pervasive as around the world?”

In Asia, he said Google has over a thousand engineers spread across eight offices in six countries, namely in Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney, Bangalore, and Hyderabad.

One can almost imagine how the sultans of search worked furiously in their labs to provide technology solutions to non-technology problems like language diversity.

Search Problem # 1 — Making info available to users in their language

“We know that more than 99 percent of what people write, say or generate never leaves the language in which it was generated,” Smith said.

For English-speaking countries like the Philippines, pulling information from the Web in other languages is just a nice feature, but not for large swaths of people across Asia whose everyday language is the native tongue.

Eight percent of the world’s population, for example, speaks Arabic, but only one percent of the content on the Web is available in Arabic, disclosed Smith. Thailand has around 60 million people, but far less than one percent of the world’s information is available in Thai. 

A Google innovation called Translate is now helping people translate from one language to another.

The tool satisfies a simple translation need such as finding the equivalent of one word in Tagalog to Japanese, Chinese or Vietnamese and vice versa, or more complicated transliteration service whereby whole websites or whole documents are translated in the language of choice.

More than a fancy feature, this actually has practical uses, the Google executives demonstrated.

If a savvy Filipino traveler, for example, would like an adventure in the unexplored territories of the world such as the old Silk Road or a horseback riding trip to the Tibetan highlands and do not want the regular tourist packages, chances are information on these regions are available only in the local language. One can now read these websites in translation.

In the same way, a non-English speaking Korean, for example, willing to travel to the Philippines and wants to know more about the country can now read local English travel websites or even the philstar.com news website in Korean.

The speech in Tagalog of newly elected President Benigno Aquino III can be uploaded in the Google Translate page and one can read it in Russian, Turkish, Urdu or Indic script. 

When Google translates, is it the work of machines, Google staff or users?

“The core technology is done by machines,” said Smith. “A machine takes the first pass at translating. In some instances that may be sufficient and perfect if you want to merely get the sense of the content. However, if you want to republish it, want to spend some time in making it better, then oftentimes end-users will invest the time to improve it.”

Google actually allows edits by professional translators or users to make the translations more accurate over time.

Search Problem #2 — Giving users new ways to search

It’s a pain to type in Asian languages using a Latin alphabet keyboard, Smith admitted.

Over the years, he said Google has developed a variety of features to make it easier for non-English speakers to type key words in the local language script in the search box.

One of these features is on-screen keyboards that allows Web users with English keyboards to search for phrases and keywords in non-English languages.

The search engine also introduced the virtual keyboard API through code.google.com, which allowed developers to enable virtual keyboards on any text field on their webpages.

“We’ve developed a variety of features to make typing easier such as Google Suggest, Google Input Method Editors for Japanese and Chinese and have added many new ‘search by click’ features recently,” Smith said.

“Lastly, we’ve developed some ways to search that don’t involve a keyboard or a mouse — search by voice, and search by location,” he added.

An example of this is an application that uses GPS in the phone to determine a user’s location and recommend what is interesting around the area such as restaurants, bars, and ATM machines. This is particularly helpful for a foreigner negotiating the labyrinths of Tokyo’s streets.

Search Problem #3 — Getting more info online

Perhaps one of the greatest impediments to a perfect search is the fact that all of the world’s information is not yet available in bits.

Google obviously isn’t going to solve this whole problem, said Smith. But what it is doing is to make it really simple to get information online. 

“Products like YouTube, Maps, Earth, and Blogger are designed so individuals and organizations can fill them up with whatever they care about most. Sometimes it’s in the aftermath of a disaster like the Victoria bushfires in Australia, sometimes it’s for a big civic event like elections. And there are lots of smaller moments in between, too. We’re even working on projects to make it easier to get translated content published back to the Web and some really interesting work to bring paper content (like facsimiles) online and make it searchable,” he said.

In the past year alone, most Asian countries have experienced the first Internet era elections, the Philippines included, and many local companies or organizations have partnered with Google to build technologies like private channels on YouTube or to show maps of polling places.

Last May, Google has made available its “Map Your Precinct” tool to enable Filipino voters to map their voting centers on election day.

The tool started out as a project of Dan Delima, a Filipino Google engineer who saw the enthusiasm of the Filipino community in using the Google Map Maker.

“By helping voters find and get their correct voting centers on May 10, our aim is to help reduce confusion on where to vote, especially since the voting center may have changed from previous years,” Delima was quoted as saying.

Google earlier disclosed that Filipinos have contributed hundreds of thousands of edits in its Google Map Maker tool since its launch in 2008, which it said helped in making the digital map of the Philippines useful to more Filipinos searching for locations and needing help in getting directions or finding businesses.

Smith added that Google has also unveiled efforts to convert paper content from newspapers and magazines that are not yet digitized through its Sydney office where scanned images of pages can be digitized through optical recognition technology.

Search Problem # 4 — Making it easier for users to find their way in Asia

Think about all the searches you do that have some geographic aspect or component, said Smith.

“Providing good answers to searches for ‘what’s nearby?’ and ‘how do I get there?’ is an especially difficult task in Asia as it has the largest and most complex transit systems in the world, incredibly dense cities, and cities where you can’t tell just by looking at a map what the best way to go is,” he said.

“It’s also a region in transition,” he added. “We have huge population migrations within and between countries, and we have metropolises that are growing and changing seemingly overnight.” 

The problem becomes more complicated as several parts of Asia don’t even have good sources for geographic data. What do you do, for example, in areas where roads don’t even have signs?

Through the Google Map Maker, many parts of Asia are being mapped one day at a time. Only recently, Smith said Google has launched driving directions in 130 countries and territories through the sheer passion of volunteer mapmakers.

What do you also do in cities like Tokyo where there are probably hundreds of restaurants and are constantly changing?

“Asia remains a continent in transition but its sheer diversity and scale surely gives us insight that hopefully our engineers can help us solve these problems and translate into Google solutions,” said Smith.

“But we are also having fun,” he added. So the next time you are in Tokyo, don’t be overwhelmed by its convoluted labyrinths and the language barrier. Just bring your phone and let technology work for you.

After all, it is probably easier for you to find your way to Akihabara from Shinjuku using your phone than getting instructions from a bystander or a local cab driver.