Basque in the web of world languages (as seen by Google Research)
Last week Google Research published an interesting piece in the blog. How languages are linked among then in the Web. So at Sustatu we published a Basque review; contributing a little to the centrality of English as our links point towards Google's English content, of course :)
That is an insightful and interesting piece of information. Basically, regarding Basque is shows that roughly a quarter of our links go to Spanish pages and another quarter go to English pages.
There's one important piece of information that the researchers in Google have certainly used and that does not appear in the article. Absolute numbers. They have taken into account "several billion most important pages on the web in 2008, including all pages in smaller languages,"... well, those numbers are interesting for us.
How many pages in Basque were there in 2008? and which was the ranking position of our languages as compared to the others in the study? I've tried to find the authors of the study, but googling their names didn't bring me much information. Found one guy in Linkedin but I need a paid subscription to send him an "linkedin email" and I guess that for most receivers that kind of messages are spam.
Can you Google please disclose that data? It is certainly of much interest for us.
The last paragraph of the article also mentions evolution from 2008... I guess they are processing those data... for a next article maybe? I would like to see the position of Basque in those data, in absolute numbers or ranking, did we improve, stall, or...?
Off-topic: my spanish language version of this blog, El Cementerio de los Ingleses, has been relocated once again. Now for a while, I hope.