Google's John Mueller was asked in a Google+ hangout a couple days ago about the sometimes poor handling of Google understanding non-English languages, specifically by looking at the synonyms Google returns in Google Webmaster Tools but also based on the search results displayed in non-English versions of Google search.
John said that they are actively working right now on trying to understand all languages better and they want examples of when they fail at it.
It seems like Google has devoted a team to improving search quality outside of English based languages. My fear is this is around improving the Panda algorithm outside of the English language and into other languages. But that can also be a very good thing for search quality. ;-)
In any event, if you see examples of Google simply getting the query wrong or issues with Webmaster Tools, Google and John want to know.
John said this at the 55:20 minute mark in the video hangout:
We are working on trying to understand more or all of the languages better.So if you see specific examples where we are not doing that properly, it will be great to have those examples.
I know this is something that we had for some languages where it was really tricky to understand the query, like with Japanese or Chinese where we get the word value wrong… This is something our systems need to kind of be adapted to over time.
So if you are seeing specific issues around that for Romanian or any other languages, I’d love to have those examples. I know the team is really keen on getting those examples and resolving that problem so you don’t have to resort to manually figuring out which synonyms to show.
Here is the video response:
Forum discussion at Google+.
