Google Philippines
The world's most popular search engine has now been localized with every major language in the world, thus making the Filipino language the default language of Google Philippines. The URL of Google Philippines is:
www.google.com.ph
Google has been localized to several languages to make the engine more friendly to users who prefer to do their Internet searches in the language of their locality. One advantage of the Google search engine is its ability to filter the Internet searches using several types of criteria--one of them language.
Using Google Philippines for your Internet searches would lead you to useful and pertinent information regarding any Filipino or Philippine-related information you want to know about. The Google search engine has the feature of displaying only search results that come from a particular country. So if you simply want to do your Internet search on websites or webpages that come from the Philippines, you may use Google Philippines to help you in your search.
Lastly, one not-so-obvious advantage of learning to use a localized version of Google is that you will learn many words of the localized language. We do not just say that this is true for Filipino, but is true for French, Spanish, German, or even Japanese and every other language that Google supports. Thus, we must say that using Google Philippines would help you, even in the smallest way, to learn some Filipino. Why is this so? The reason is simple and that is because of the fact that Google uses a single interface design for its search engine. Thus, you will learn to associate words by looking at the position of a particular word, link or button, and associating it with the Google interface that you usually use. For example, the main Google site google.com presents two buttons at its start page. These buttons are "Google Search" and "I'm feeling lucky". If you go to the Google Philippine website google.com.ph, you would see that the first 2 buttons read "Hanapin sa Google" and "Sinusuwerte ako". Thus, you would probably guess that the word "search" in English translates to the word "Hanapin" in Filipino. In the same way, the English phrase "I'm feeling lucky" translates to "Sinusuwerte ako" in Filipino. Actually, the English word "lucky" translates to "suwerte" or "sinusuwerte" in Filipino.
If you are some Internet savvy, then it would be safe to assume that you have used the advanced search features of Google in your web searches. The rest of this article would walk you through on those features. This would help you do more powerful searches not just based on language but also based on content and relevance.
First of all, have you ever considered pressing the "I'm feeling lucky" button in google? Do you know what it means? Actually, the "I'm feeling lucky" button is some sort of clever shortcut search button, in the sense that once you click on that button, you will be taken to the first page of the site returned for your search query. This saves time especially if your precious minutes or even seconds really matter to you a lot!
Second, you can click on the "Advanced Search" link beside the search text box in all Google sites. The advanced search enables you to narrow down your search to various criteria such as filtering out occurrences of the words, selecting the file format of the results, selecting only particular domains and other useful search-narrowing criteria. If you are looking for recent information, you may want to use the "date" criteria on the advanced search menu to let Google return only sites that pass the particular date criteria you have selected. In this way, you can see articles or sites updated within the past three (3) months or say, within the year
Last but not least of all is the "Preferences" link also beside the main Google search text box. This button enables you select the user interface for your Google searches. You may also choose pages written only on a particular language. This feature makes Google a truly powerful search engine.
Trying out all the features in Google Philippines or in any localized Google site will enable you to utilize the power of Internet search using the language of your choice. In addition to making your searches more efficient and relevant, you will also learn a bit of the language from the locality that you have selected.
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