Last March I met Álvaro Blanco from Funredes (http://funredes.org) and he was doing a very interesting research just in these matters of language penetration on the Internet.

He had already gone through most of your problems and, I’d dare say, had went over them and was getting some coherent and consistent output.

If you’d like to contact him, please write back to me.

All the best,

i.

I have a fairly basic question about the Chinese issue – are you conflating all Chinese dialects into one uber Chinese proxy? I’m just wondering if other languages, say, Cyrillic-based ones, they are lumped together in similar studies. ie, difficult for a computer to recognize the difference between Russian, Bulgarian or Ukranian (which are all very similar, save for a few letters). Just wondering.

While the internet in these countries with be mainly text-based for some time, I think the Chinese internet is becoming more multimedia with more images and videos. Chinese netizens have access to cameras that are cheaper and bigger bandwidth. In the next couple of years Chinese internet users will prefer posting a video or picture of something they want to describe rather than type it out. Traditional text based search will have to evolve to accommodate this.

Also, as English becomes more popular in China, a large part of Chinese commercial internet will become bi-lingual. I am already seeing Chinese companies running English blogs.