Good question. I am a Russian speaker - ran the same searches on google.ru and got much better results (than google.se). Were Google.ru's results better than Yandex? Probably not.

Perhaps the problem isn't quite as fundamental (non-English NLP sucks) but has more to do with secondary Locale handling in specific countries?

Interesting observation on US-centricity (is that a word?) nonetheless. Many major US Corps derive > 50% rev from outside of US. Not sure if GOOG is one of those.

You raise a very interesting point. Just because a lot of American companies draw a large amount of income from abroad does not make them respect the market or adjust the product to that market. IN fact, US imperialist policy (and that is simply what it is, don't take me for a rebel commie, but a country that has been at offensive war for most of it's history cannot be named anything but an imperialist) has insured that other countries are force fed American products, right after we liberize them, as in liberate for immediate colonisation.

> country that has been at offensive war for most of it's history cannot be named anything but an imperialist

Actually, it can.

The fact that both offensive war and imperialism are bad does not mean that they're the same.

If you can't distinguish between different evils and confuse them, how do we know that you can identify evils?

In other news, imperialism is not colonialism.

Yeah, hardly scientific, but it's at least anecdotal evidence that there's some room for improvement. Like you I wonder how different the results are with google.ru though. I live in Ireland, but sometimes do queries in Dutch. Google.nl often gives different and much better results for those than google.ie.

Also slightly off-topic: I appreciate that English isn't the author's first language, but, wow, that was painful to read. I feel his point might come across a bit stronger without sentences like "Or perhaps a painkiller should be administered to dispense the suffering of google as we strike with the mercykill?" or "Perhaps it is time for google to crash down on the matress of bitter disappointment as well, a la black swan."

I enjoyed the originality and wit. In Russian language, mercykill strike you!

We don't know what the settings of his computer are (the fact that the UI is in english makes me guessing he has the "hl=en" setting). He should add "&hl=ru" to the url to make sure he is searching the russian version of Google.

That's the point of the article- there is no such problem in germanic languages and many other European languages that the google algo have been tweaked for. Search on google in english and swedish, without any URL string shenannigans, get good results for both.

That's often not the case for me (french/english), I routinely switch the hl=xx to get relevant results (I default to hl=en).

Why should it matter? Both english and swedish work well in the "swedish" google search box in firefox. That's the point- the Russian algo and redirection to it is simply not there yet.