“Yandex” is an acronym for the phrase “Yet Another Indexer.” and is the leading search engine in Russia. Their search engine automatically searches all possible forms of a given word, takes into account the distance between the searched words within sentences and paragraphs, and searches documents in the major Cyrillic languages — Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian — as well as in English, French, and German.

As of August 2008 Yandex had approximately 55% of the Russian search market, compared to Google’s 21%.  Yandex now allows visitors to limit searches to only foreign websites, meaning non-Russian websites.  This global search is also available at the company’s experimental Yandex.com portal launched for testing new search algorithms.

Twitter already stated earlier in the week that it was geting about 50 million tweets being sent out per day. New data released shows that approximately half of those tweets are in non-English language. Approximately 25 milion foreign languge tweets being sent out per day.
A lot of people are using Twitter in languages other than English, and those numbers are expected to grow, as Twitter recently has put out statements seeking help to crowdsource their platform into FIGS.

The number one language aside from English is Japanese, with approximately 14% of all tweets being sent out in Nihongo. Portuguese, Malay and Spanish closely behind.
 
Source: Techcrunch

The folks at MyGengo, a foreign language translation services company recently published a report covering the market conditions for the language learning industry.

Here some interesting facts revealed:

• Chinese, Spanish and English represent only 30% of the worlds spoken language by population. But these languages make up roughly 60% of the internet users.
• 52% of non-English language users only buy from websites where the information is presented in their native language.
• Since 2008, Russian and Arabic online audiences have grown over 1000%, which Chinese close behind.
• When looking at French and Japanese native language speakers, 60% of them only buy from websites where the product and service information is presented in their native language.
• 56.2% of forieng language speakers say that when making a purchasing decision, information written in their native language was more important than a low price.

Here is the whitepaper from the folks at MyGenga, a truly great report.. kudos.

They’re coming! Perhaps around mid 2010, domain name URL’s written in non-English language will become available for the internet. So a new gold rush is set to begin.

The Internet is set to undergo one of the biggest changes in its four-decade history with the expected approval this week of international domain names — or addresses — that can be written in languages other than English, an official said Monday.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN — the non-profit group that oversees domain names — is holding a meeting this week in Seoul. Domain names are the monikers behind every Web site, e-mail address and Twitter post, such as “.com” and other suffixes.

One of the key issues to be taken up by ICANN’s board at this week’s gathering is whether to allow for the first time entire Internet addresses to be in scripts that are not based on Latin letters. That could potentially open up the Web to more people around the world as addresses could be in characters as diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic — in which Russian is written.

“This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago,” Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board, told reporters, calling it a “fantastically complicated technical feature.” He said he expects the board to grant approval on Friday, the conference’s final day.

This is going to be a big change, and we will keep on top of it and report about it on this blog. Here is the full article on the matter.