Swahili, one of the most widely spoken languages across Africa with over 100 million speakers predominantly in Eastern, Central, and Southern Africa, becomes the latest African languages to be optimized for search engine searches on Google.
Google Search will, going forward, make it a lot easier for Swahili speakers to run online searches using Swahili words and gets results contextualized in Swahili. As it currently stands, though users can run Google Search using Swahili words, they get minimal in terms of contextualized results based on the language.
“When someone conducts a search, they want answers as quickly as possible. To help Swahili speakers discover new information more easily, we’re now making the Google Knowledge Graph available in Swahili,” said Christina Lin, the Lead Product Search Marketing for SSA.
“This means that next time you sear for President Uhuru Kenyatta under the Kiswahili language setting, you’ll instantly get information that’s relevant to your query such as President Kenyatta’s date of birth, siblings, and children among other biographical details.”
FYI – the Knowledge Graph is a Google Search feature that strives to learn about real-world entities and the relationship to the query you are searching information on. A route Google deemed it best instead of listing keywords alongside unrelated contexts.
With Knowledge Graph, you can search for things, people, or places that Google Search knows about; the landmarks, sports teams, celebrities, buildings, cities, movies, geographical features, celestial objects, work of art among others. The Knowledge Graph pull up all relevant information about the subject of your query. It is seen as an early stage in the process of creating the next generation of search, one that will tap into the World Wide Web’s collective intelligence and understands the world much better.
The services are not just rooted in public information sources like Wikipedia, Freebase, and the CIA World Factbook. It is augmented on a much bigger scale; since Google Search strives to focus on a more comprehensive breadth and depth. Currently, Knowledge Graph is available in 59 languages, Swahili being the latest addition to that list.