Google hopes search translation tools make profit
Google Inc. planned to introduce a feature Wednesday that automatically translates Internet search requests and results in 12 languages, underscoring the rapidly growing company's ambitions outside the United States.
The tools allow Google's users to enter search requests in their native languages and then choose to have the phrases as well as the accompanying results automatically translated into another language. Users can then click on a link and have the entire Web page translated through a service that Google had already been offering.
Google expects the new translation service for search results to be particularly popular outside of the United States and the United Kingdom because so much of the Internet's content is published in English.
Besides English, Google's search results translator works in Arabic, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese. Yahoo Inc., which runs the Web's second largest search engine behind Google, already offers a service that has been automatically translating search results in Germany, France and Japan since 2005, spokeswoman Kathryn Kelly said. The Sunnyvale-based company also offers translation tools through its BabelFish site.
More recently, Yahoo has been trying to woo more traffic outside the United States through its ``answers'' service, which relies on its users to respond to each other's questions in nine different languages.
By making its search engine more appealing to people who don't speak English, Google is angling to sell more advertising in international markets and maintain the impressive financial growth that has driven a more than fivefold increase in its stock price in less than three years. The Mountain View-based company's shares fell $1.89 to $473.97 Wednesday.
Google's family of Web sites, including online video pioneer YouTube.com, already attracts the world's largest audience, according to comScore Media Metrix.
American Technology Research analyst Rob Sanderson is among those who believe Google is poised to cash in on its opportunities outside the United States and Britain.
Google collected $7.6 billion (euro5.63 billion), or 72 percent, of its 2006 revenue from sources in the United States and Britain, Sanderson said in a report issued Tuesday. If the company had fared as well in other key markets around the world, Sanderson estimated Google would have generated an additional $4.9 billion (euro3.63 billion) to $8.7 billion (euro6.45 billion) in revenue last year
The acquisition, which has been rumored for the past week, is expected to close in early June, according to TechCrunch, a well-connected blog that revealed Google's plans to buy YouTube three days before that deal was announced last October. Contacted Wednesday, Google declined to comment on its reported interest in Chicago-based FeedBurner.
In another move Wednesday that had long been anticipated, Google began experimenting with the distribution of video ads to a small group of Web sites. The company will share the video revenue with its partners, just as it does with the short, text-based ads that account for most of its profit.
The video ads, which will be limited to 30 seconds, can be skipped by a Web site's visitors.
