Web Searching and Browsing: A Multilingual Perspective

Since the publication of "The World Wide Web" in a 1999 volume of Advances in Computers, worldwide Internet usage has grown tremendously, with the most rapid growth in some non-English-speaking regions. A widening gap exists between the surging demand for non-English Web content and the availability of non-English resources. This chapter reviews previous works on computer-mediated information seeking on the Web, computing technologies that support Web searching and browsing, and Web portals in several major regions and languages of the world. We introduce a general framework for supporting Web searching and browsing in a multilingual world. Three Web portals were developed to support searching, browsing, and postretrieval analysis of Chinese business intelligence, Spanish business intelligence, and Arabic medical intelligence. Results of experiments involving 67 native speakers of the three languages confirm the usability and benefits of the portals and support the applicability of the framework. The review, framework, and findings presented in this chapter contribute to the fields of Web analysis, text mining, business and medical informatics, and human computer interaction.