Thread: Foreign (Non-English) internet sites

I think that you can specify a language in a google advanced search. The again, if you put English words in a search, you are bound to get English sites as results. If you were to put in a few German words I bet you would get German sites instead. If you want to search in a different script (Chinese, Arabic etc) then I think that is also possible, but I have no idea how to enter those characters using a standard keyboard. I know it can be done - just not sure how. I suspect that installing the appropriate language pack for your OS would be a start.

Peter

You can limit your google search to a particular country by adding a site qualifier to the search terms. e.g.

"woodwork site:.au" will find matches with the word woodwork in Australian domain names, while "woodwork site:.uk" will find sites in Great Britain.

Country codes can be found here.

Also searching using "site:woodworkforums.com" will find just hits in these forums.

Thanks Fuzzie and Peter

I have already tried the foreign language word in the search term and this has yielded some interesting results. Very useful to see what the machines cost in their country of origin in Euros, vs the cost imported into Oz.

The additional info from Fuzzie is yet another tack that I intend to try shortly.

Cheers
LiliB

Google Translate

Originally Posted by Fuzzie

You can limit your google search to a particular country by adding a site qualifier to the search terms. e.g.

"woodwork site:.au" will find matches with the word woodwork in Australian domain names, while "woodwork site:.uk" will find sites in Great Britain.

Well that doesn't work for me in my Google searches. I am sick of searching for an Australian company in Google and getting American sites listed. I have even clicked on "search Australia only" but still comes up with American sites. Don't get me wrong I am not anti USA sites but sometimes I want to locate something in Australia and this just does not happen with Google. If you search for something in Australia, it will still list sites from other countries. And yes, I do type the quotation marks.

Originally Posted by munruben

And yes, I do type the quotation marks.

Leave out the quotes. Just type the text in the google search box.

For Au results I use Google, for UK results I use Google, so I assume that there's a google in each country, you'll just need to work out the domain for each country.

Hi Richard

I think yours might be the best short way to get into the info from a specific country.

I'm going to try it on NZ, because the Aus Dollar is currently very favourable, and I want to see what some of the camera equipment would cost me purchased from NZ.

Cheers
LiliB

When I was looking for camera equipment, I found that Japan was cheapest (especially on the secondhand market) but it wasn't by a huge margin - by the time I'd added in shipping and the cost of the company in Japan that buys on your behalf and onships, it was pretty much the 'six of one, half a dozen of the other' comparison.

I ended up buying from the US.

If I want to search for a British site I use Google Uk, similarly other countries as NZ, Germany etc. Google does try and prevent you doing this but type in the URL and you will get the national site. By doing this searching and using foreign language sites should not be problem. It has always struck me strange that we in the english speaking world should presume that there is nothing out there except english. I bet we only see a fraction of what is out there. Here is a site giving all Google's national search engines.

Language/Country specific Google Search Engine’s

Hi Mimi

I couldn't agree more, that we are too heavily locked into the English language based information on Google, and I love to look at different sites that are not necessarily English.

I checked out prices in Germany whilst recently looking at woodworking equipment, and found that we really pay fairly dearly for being so far away from the rest of the world.

NZ, UK and US aren't all that favourable for purchasing, because base prices are fairly much the same and the exchange rate doesn't bring much advantage, except for books from the US. Postage can be a real killer in the US. I bought US$300 worth of art materials and paid US$65 for freight, so it's only going to be worthwhile if these are special goods, that can't be bought here.

Specialty things for say photography and art (my hobbies) and especially specialised software can be favourable in the US because we are such a small market base and the importers generally can't get their prices down much because of low sales volumes.

I wanted some new pastels, and spoke to a local importer, about a special offer available only in the US, and he advised me to "buy it now. don't let the offer get away!! " because he couldn't come close to that type of pricing, even if he were able to buy it, which he couldn't.

We seem to pay enormous mark-ups in Australia for books, and I tend to purchase from Amazon. Postage isn't all that high for books, so the price advantage is pretty good. There is also much greater choice in specialised literature, for example, scroll saw books, again because it such a large market.

However, it is with knowledge and research that opening up the information 'highway' is very important, and I remember reading translations of scholarly works by scandinavians when I was researching a medical matter a couple of years ago, and I think that's where a lot of people don't really use the 'net' to its best advantage.

Cheers
LiliB