Google Realtime in several minority languages
Google was presenting search results from realtime information flows (Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed...) since some months ago, but it was just some days ago that we realised that it did restrict results to Basque, if you searched those updates from a Basque interface. Then, it came the announcement of Google Realtime, an standalone version of those searches. Basque is included, in a total of 40 languages, but curiously enough, Google doesn't mention which languages are those.
So, with some URL hacking, I could determine that several European minority languages are included, while, to the contrary, some state-languages are not...
- Basque, http://www.google.es/realtime?hl=eu
- Galician, http://www.google.es/realtime?hl=gl
- Welsh, http://www.google.es/realtime?hl=cy
- Scottish Gaelic, http://www.google.es/realtime?hl=gd
- Irish, http://www.google.com/realtime?hl=ga
- Catalan, http://www.google.fr/realtime?hl=ca
Try with a search like Twitter in Welsh, and twist the URL with the language codes for other languages.
You will see that it works with nl, ne or no (Dutch, Nepali and Norwegian) as well as the minority languages listed above, but not with se, dk or ee (Swedish, Danish or Estonian). Basque screenshot here below when searched for Android.
However, none of those languages has the extra options to sea results in threaded conversations or restrict results to a given geographical area, which are only available in English, Japanese, Spanish and Russian so far.
I don't think Google will release anything, but they have a language detection API. There are some language guessers that are open source, like TextCat.
On the other hand, a correction, there ARE indeed Realtime versions for Swedish, Danish and Estonian. Idiot me, I tried with country-codes instead of the correct language codes which are sv, da and et