Eddielogic

– Thoughts on Strategy and Management

Our world in a search engine?

In Germany there is a very interesting business magazine. It is called “Brand eins”. Translated into English it means “Brand One”. The second headline is “the other business magazin” and I can confirm that the editors, authors and articles are quite different. 

There is a interesting section called “the world in numbers” in which I discovered the following information:

  • Number of languages which are spoken in the world: 5.615* = That is amazing!
  • Number of languages which are spoken in Australia: 231* = I had never expected this!
  • Number of languages for which Google is able to deliver results: 35*

(*Source: Brand Eins (2006): Die Welt in Zahlen, Nr. 11, in: http://www.brandeins.de/ available on November 12, 2006)

In mathematical terms Google only is able to search within 0,62 % of our available languages. I know that is a little bit to simple and wrong, since it does not consider the number of people who speak a certain language. However from my point of view it is a nice illustration of a possible development in terms of internet and search engines….no matter whether it is Google (what is one of my favourites) or Ask. It might be that we are observers of a trend: It can not be found in a search engine, it does not exist.

 

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