About the Bilingual Search

This is an overview of this site's experimental bilingual search engine.

What is a bilingual search engine?

A bilingual search engine performs simultaneous queries in multiple languages (in this case, French and English). It then displays the results of the queries side by side, and attempts to order the reults so as to display documents with similar content next to each other.

How do I use the bilingual search engine?

You must enter a French word or term and an English word or term. The search will then compare the usage of these words or terms in the two languages.

Why do I have to enter both English and French terms?

Because the purpose of the bilingual search engine is to compare two words or terms. See below for more details.

For everyday translation of basic French words (or translation of English words into French), use the site's French-English dictionary or English-French dictionary.

What is the difference between a bilingual search engine and a bilingual dictionary?

A bilingual dictionary, such as the French-English dictionary available on this web site, is used to confirm the translation of a particular word, or find out other details about that word's translation.

A bilingual search engine, on the other hand, is generally used to compare usage of a source and a target term, when you already know or suspect that they are translations of one another. For example, a translator might use the bilingual search engine to confirm that a particular general translation that they know is indeed appropriate in a given context.

The bilingual search engine is one of the tools that is being used in compiling this site's French-English dictionary.

Why do I have to enter the reCAPTCHA words on every search?

Compared to a normal on-line dictionary, a bilingual search engine uses a much greater amount of server resources (e.g. CPU time to perform the result ranking, bandwidth to retrieve results from the web). Forcing users to enter the reCAPTCHA words on each search prevents resources from being abused by "robots" (programs that perform a large number of automated queries).

The bilingual search engine is currently at an experimental stage. It will be improved over time, based on the types of queries that people perform. If it proves popular, then an alternative to the reCAPTCHA may be used in the future to allow genuine users to perform queries more quickly.

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