Google Maps Thailand debuts

Yesterday Google launched Google Maps Thailand, a localized version of its excellent map service. This means new features for Thai users, including My Maps and Mapplets.

The video below explains in Thai the (very) basics about Google Maps.

Here's another one (also in Thai) about creating your own maps:

Google Maps' coverage of Thailand has gotten very good lately. If you don't read Thai, you can still use the regular website (maps.google.com) to do the same things in English.

Also, check out Flickr user MacroArt's photos from the launch.

[Via Google Maps Mania]

Thai language added to Google Translate

I just learned that Google Translate, a machine translation tool from everyone's favorite search engine company, has added support for the Thai language, plus six more. This brings the total up to 41 languages, with the capability to translate between any two of them. You can either cut-and-paste text or feed it a URL to have it translate entire pages.

The accuracy of machine translation improves the more data Google has, usually in the form of bilingual corpora. So expect the results to be a huge grab bag for now, but also expect them to get better over time.

Notice that after you paste text to be translated, there's a link on the bottom right of the results page inviting you to "Suggest a better translation." This is great, because it harvests human knowledge to augment the machine translation.

The simple phrase ผมชื่อสมชาย returned "I named Somchai", so I suggested "My name is Somchai" instead. Piece of cake. Then I tried อภิสิทธิ์ เวชชาชีวะ (knowing it would likely translate it literally). It returned "Prerogative physician Charles existence." So I suggested "Abhisit Vejjajiva".

I've never really explored all the features of Google Translate, since I don't really know any of the languages it has hitherto supported. Exploring it now with Thai, though, they have another really cool feature: Translated Search. It's your basic cross-lanugage information retrieval. You search in your native language, specify the target language, and it returns pages in that language about the thing you searched.

For example, if you want to find Thai websites about Thai history (for, say, the images), search "Thai history", with Thai as the target language. It returns pages like the Thai Wikipedia entry on Thai history, with the first few lines in both languages. You can then click through to see the whole page translated, or view it in the original language. Quite handy.

Unfortunately, these new tools suffer from the same problem that Thai searching in regular Google does: tone marker blindness. Type ชา "tea" into Google Translate and you get "slow" (which is actually spelled ช้า), type ดิ้น "squirm" and it returns "soil" (actually ดิน), ไหม "silk" returns "burn" (actually ไหม้), and so forth. It's a problem.

Still, though, I'm really glad to see Thai on Google Translate. It can only get better with time.

Google's new trick

Sometime last year, Google started segmenting Thai text in webpages it indexes, dramatically increasing the number of hits for pretty much every word out there.

Well, Google has a new trick.

I noticed this week (though I can't confirm exactly when it started) that when you search for a given word, Google returns words with different tone marks from the word you queried. This may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what you want to use Google for.

Fortunately, you can get around it by using quotes around your search term. The only exceptions I've noticed to this are non-dictionary words, for which Google still seems to think it knows better than the user.

A few test cases (feel free to replicate these at home):

• I searched กึง (an onomatopoeic word for a loud noise). I was fishing for กึ่ง ('half'). Of the 100 results on the first page, only one contained my actual target. The rest were the much more common word กึ่ง.
• Hits without quotes: 1,400,000
  
• Hits with quotes: 51,100
  
• I searched ดิ้น ('wriggle, struggle'), fishing for ดิน ('dirt'). Similar story to above.
• Hits without quotes: 11,900,000
  
• Hits with quotes: 1,120,000
• I searched กิ๊ฟ (a non-dictionary word, seen in loans like 'gift shop'). Returns a lot of hits for things like Giffarine (spelled กิฟฟาริน). But this is where it gets weird. Putting quotes around it not only doesn't restrict the search to only my exact query, it actually increased the number of reported hits. I have no idea why.
  
• Hits without quotes: 1,480,000
• Hits with quotes: 1,610,000
  

Another thing I've meant to write about is Google's spelling suggestions. One of the great things about search engines these days is the "did you mean..." feature, where they harvest the power of the gigantic language corpus that is the web to predict what you probably meant to search for if you misspell a word. I know Google does this for Thai, too (simple test search: ประมาน will return the suggestion ประมาณ). But it only offers suggestions for Thai search terms on the Thai version of their site, Google.co.th. And since I usually use Google.com, not co.th, I have no idea how long they've been doing this. For users of Google.co.th out there, is this a longstanding feature or something new?