Comments on false friends, good and bad translation: Fachbesucher auf Englisch

what is Google showing us when we search? The resu...

2012-01-10T06:57:23.324-08:00

what is Google showing us when we search? The results are horribly complicated.

Very short answer is: if you are looking up things whose locality is important - restaurants, bakers, cinema, trade fairs (from the UK or Germany, you get a lot of European fairs, from San Francisco, you don't, which makes sense) you get localized results, some more than others. If you are looking up things whose locality is not obviously important, as far as I see, you get the same results no matter where you search from.

You can try running the search through a freebie proxy server in the US or in England. If you can find an anonymous one, then google uses the server's ip address instead of yours, if the answer comes up the same (and it did for me, over and over) then that set of results are not being filtered too badly depending on location. You can also set your Germany city on google.de. On Google.com, you can set any country or city in the world. The more precise the location, the more restrictive the results.

In the case of "trade visitor" versus "attendee" in the context of "trade fair", I get
1. +"trade visitor" +"trade fair" with the google.de search engine, location detected by google: Stuttgart = 37,200 hits
2. +"trade visitor" +"trade fair" with the google.com search engine, no location set, no location listed as identified = 37,200 hits (no difference. Why? I don't know.)
3. +"trade visitor" +"trade fair" with the google.com search engine, location set by me : UK = 37,200 hits
4. +"trade visitor" +"trade fair" with the google.com search engine, location set by me: London, UK = no hits.
1. +"trade visitor" +"trade fair", with the google.com search engine, searching site:co.uk = 105 hits

1. +"attendee" + "trade fair" with the google.de search engine, Location: Stuttgart = 4.220.000 hits
2. +"attendee" + "trade fair" with the google.com search engine, no location set, no location listed as identified = 4.220.00 hits (look, the same again)
3. +"attendee" + "trade fair" with the google.com search engine, location set by me: UK = 4.220.000 hits (still the same)
4. +"attendee" + "trade fair" with the google.com search engine, location set by me: London, UK = 1,910 hits.
1. +"attendee" + "trade fair", with the google.com search engine, searching site:co.uk , =61,300 hits (so here instead of looking out at the world, we are looking at the UK)

It isn't really easy to use Google in a general way anymore. I think your best bet is to search within sites such as co.uk, au.com and the like. The USA is a problem, since com is not just just USA, and site:USA is not very big. Not sure what it is.

A very good point - da muss ich unsere Expertin Li...

2012-01-03T01:59:18.167-08:00

A very good point - da muss ich unsere Expertin Lisa fragen. Ich melde mich dazu...

"Den Begriff gibt es – both in the USA and in...

2012-01-03T01:50:37.824-08:00

"Den Begriff gibt es – both in the USA and in the UK. Aber auffällig beliebt ist er bei den Germans. Wenn man ihn googelt, sind 19 von den ersten 20 Einschlägen (sorry, Hits) entweder reinrassige deutsche Websites oder Auftritte mit teutonischem Migrationshintergrund."

Danke für die sehr erhellenden Vorschläge zu diesem Begriff. Aber ich bin mittlerweile etwas skeptisch geworden, wenn es um Google als Instrument zur Bewertung idiomatischer Wendungen oder von Begriffen geht.
Seit einiger Zeit sind nämlich die Suchergebnisse und ihre Anordung vom Standpunkt des Suchenden abhängig. Die gleiche Suche kann in London völlig andere Websites ans Licht bringen als in Berlin.

Bisher habe ich in der Google-Oberfläche noch keine Option gefunden, eine standortneutrale Suche durchzuführen, wie früher. Seht ihr da eine Möglichkeit?

Excellent post about a topic that is discussed so ...

2011-11-18T23:25:02.782-08:00

Excellent post about a topic that is discussed so often, but to which there never seem to be any definitive, usable suggestions. Thank you for sharing your informative insight on this topic!