Internet searching and browsing in a multilingual world: An experiment on the Chinese business intelligence portal (CBizPort)

The rapid growth of the non-English-speaking Internet population has created a need for better searching and browsing capabilities in languages other than English. However, existing search engines may not serve the needs of many non-English-speaking Internet users. In this paper, we propose a generic and integrated approach to searching and browsing the Internet in a multilingual world. Based on this approach, we have developed the Chinese Business Intelligence Portal (CBizPort), a meta-search engine that searches for business information of mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Additional functions provided by CBizPort include encoding conversion (between Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese), summarization, and categorization. Experimental results of our user evaluation study show that the searching and browsing performance of CBizPort was comparable to that of regional Chinese search engines, and CBizPort could significantly augment these search engines. Subjects' verbal comments indicate that CBizPort performed best in terms of analysis functions, cross-regional searching, and user-friendliness, whereas regional search engines were more efficient and more popular. Subjects especially liked CBizPort's summarizer and categorizer, which helped in understanding search results. These encouraging results suggest a promising future of our approach to Internet searching and browsing in a multilingual world.