FuzzyBear
10-11-2005, 05:35 AM
This is going to be long, it's going to be a discourse, and it's mostly just sporadic backup information to the question I'm going to ask at the bottom.
I got a bug up my rear end after seeing a news article on scrabble in the welsh language. Since I'm a huge linguophile (but not a polyglot yet) I was intrigued. So I started to search around for as much information as I could find about the subject. I searched for all sorts of forms of "scrabble language(s), translations, versions", plenty of whatnot.
I got absolutely nothing until I hit up "foreign language scrabble". I'll get to my point shortly.
I spent a year working with a group of about 35 absolute geniuses (we're talking their starting salary straight out of college was 120k minimum, and proceeded rapidly up from there into the 7 figs) all from other countries.
I was supporting them (for much less salary of course), interacting with them, befriending them, and spending lunch breaks with them.
I learned one very disturbing thing from them over the course of that year.
The world is VERY different than the way I see it, and almost all of them saw the same the world in the same (different from me and mine) way, no matter which portions of europe, asia, africa they had scattered in from.
The bard in me has always considered the internet to be the world's biggest and best library. The modern library of Alexandria, almost.
So seeing something that I've always considered to be the most amazing and comprehensive (and still growing) gathering of knowledge in the light of such a seperating paradigm as "country" kinda hurt. The fact that an automated computerized engine populated equally by anything it can crawl wouldn't turn up anything even resembling mildly detailed results until I included the word "foreign" was a shock. Basically, I'm coming to the conclusion that most of the sites I find in english are going to be tailored to americans, and therefore cut off some of the "extraneous" information that I might be looking for.
(IMPORTANT COMMENT 1 ~ Please don't discuss the current EU/UN debate about "control of the internet", that's an unrelated technically complicated issue in comparison to the particular spiritual and personal issue that I'm speaking of here, and I don't want an OT flamewar. I can go other places for that.)
(IMPORTANT COMMENT 2 ~ Please don't misconstrue this as america bashing, and don't make comments that have anything to do with that, this is simply and solely related to my personal realization that I might not have access to as much information as I thought I did previously. I'd like to keep this civil, follow the easy ways, and avoid a thread-lock on something that could very easily be a locked topic.)
I'm wondering if someone out of my paradigm has any tips for finding non-americentric results in a search engine. Keywords you typically use when searching for results that mostly stem from a different country?
(aside from searching in other languages, preferably. I have a few of the unicode pages installed, but I read them VERY slowly by comparison and lose most of the information in translation.)
Or perhaps another search engine or two that you use?
I'm open to advice.
Thanks.
I got a bug up my rear end after seeing a news article on scrabble in the welsh language. Since I'm a huge linguophile (but not a polyglot yet) I was intrigued. So I started to search around for as much information as I could find about the subject. I searched for all sorts of forms of "scrabble language(s), translations, versions", plenty of whatnot.
I got absolutely nothing until I hit up "foreign language scrabble". I'll get to my point shortly.
I spent a year working with a group of about 35 absolute geniuses (we're talking their starting salary straight out of college was 120k minimum, and proceeded rapidly up from there into the 7 figs) all from other countries.
I was supporting them (for much less salary of course), interacting with them, befriending them, and spending lunch breaks with them.
I learned one very disturbing thing from them over the course of that year.
The world is VERY different than the way I see it, and almost all of them saw the same the world in the same (different from me and mine) way, no matter which portions of europe, asia, africa they had scattered in from.
The bard in me has always considered the internet to be the world's biggest and best library. The modern library of Alexandria, almost.
So seeing something that I've always considered to be the most amazing and comprehensive (and still growing) gathering of knowledge in the light of such a seperating paradigm as "country" kinda hurt. The fact that an automated computerized engine populated equally by anything it can crawl wouldn't turn up anything even resembling mildly detailed results until I included the word "foreign" was a shock. Basically, I'm coming to the conclusion that most of the sites I find in english are going to be tailored to americans, and therefore cut off some of the "extraneous" information that I might be looking for.
(IMPORTANT COMMENT 1 ~ Please don't discuss the current EU/UN debate about "control of the internet", that's an unrelated technically complicated issue in comparison to the particular spiritual and personal issue that I'm speaking of here, and I don't want an OT flamewar. I can go other places for that.)
(IMPORTANT COMMENT 2 ~ Please don't misconstrue this as america bashing, and don't make comments that have anything to do with that, this is simply and solely related to my personal realization that I might not have access to as much information as I thought I did previously. I'd like to keep this civil, follow the easy ways, and avoid a thread-lock on something that could very easily be a locked topic.)
I'm wondering if someone out of my paradigm has any tips for finding non-americentric results in a search engine. Keywords you typically use when searching for results that mostly stem from a different country?
(aside from searching in other languages, preferably. I have a few of the unicode pages installed, but I read them VERY slowly by comparison and lose most of the information in translation.)
Or perhaps another search engine or two that you use?
I'm open to advice.
Thanks.