Include translations in search results

[norku]

Vbet does not currently support translations in search results. If a user performs a search in a language other than the forum default, no results are returned even though the terms exist in his language. Can this be rectified in a future release please?

[vBET]

Yes. We do not support it now. And I think that it is important issue to give such support. So request is accepted.

Please note that solution will be limited. We are able to translate search queries which are not in forum default language to forum default language, so searches will be better, still:
1. Translated query can be not accurate to user intentions so results can not be perfect, but should be much better than now
2. This will not work for threads written in other languages - data are stored in vBulletin database in original text (as written by author) so this original text is indexed by search engine. Translating query to forum default will miss those threads which are written in other language

Also we have to think about when to translate:
- Should we use user default language setting for this (will not work for guests)
- Should we translate search queries when those go from translated pages
- Should we check each time by Google detection language what is query language and then translate?

Please note that for search queries language detection is not good idea because those are very short strings. So detection will most probably not give good results. I think that we could just assume that if someone is searching from page translated to i.e. German, then we assume that query is also in German and always translate it to forum default (even if it is - without detection). This is simplest solution and should be appropriate for at least 90% if such queries. As I wrote we could also try to detect real language, but for 1-2 word queries Google will most probably give not too good results. As I remember Google didn’t handle well detection for too short message. You can check it yourself by writing test messages in test section which are in other language and have only 1-2 words. If it will not be opaque appropriately in lang bbcode - it means that Google detection failed for such short sentence.

Please give us your feedback how you see it