Catalan is gaining presence in Google search results and the results have doubled. The increase in the visibility of content in Catalan begins to "recover the lost normality" after the work of almost a year of L'Aliança per la presència digital del Catalán, formed by ten civil society entities and promoted by the Generalitat of Catalonia . Google issued a statement this Friday informing of the changes. “Over the last few months we have made a series of changes to better adjust the results to the language in which someone searches. We are grateful to everyone who has provided us with examples in different languages to test our improvements, including Catalan-speaking users and Aliança for the digital presence of Catalan.”
The Fundació .cat, coordinator of l'Aliança, has assigned a specific team, headed by Albert Cuesta and Pep Masoliver, which has spent 10 months analyzing more than 600 web pages with content in Catalan and other languages and working jointly with Google and other search engines that allowed “opening the technical dialogue” with Google and Microsoft engineering to try to resolve “the malfunction that affected more languages and cultures in the world,” the Aliança entity stated in a statement to the media.
As a result of the hard work, Google has begun this August to apply changes to the algorithms that have allowed the improvement of the visibility of Catalan. The study “has confirmed that in searches of an arbitrary set of descriptors that the Alliance periodically observes, the presence of pages in Catalan among the first three results more than doubled: a month ago they were only 24% while currently they are the 57%.”
Thus, users who have their language options configured can verify the improvement by doing searches that previously led to pages in Spanish and now do so in Catalan such as "fc Barcelona" or "línia L5 metro"
The Minister of Business, Roger Torrent, has reaffirmed that one of the Government's priorities is for Catalan to also have more strength and presence on the Internet and has stated that, although they will continue working, “the problem has reversed and has clearly entered the phase of solution".
Albert Cuesta, coordinator of the Alliance, has valued Google's reaction very positively: “the effort that the company has made to once again respect the linguistic preferences of users precisely at a time when the emergence of AI chatbots complicates much the behavior of traditional web search engines. Now, although the trend is clearly positive, it is still early to see how the improvement affects the traffic of websites in Catalan. That is why we will maintain dialogue with Google engineers and we are establishing a device to verify that the visibility of Catalan in search engines does not deteriorate again.
For all these reasons, the entity invites citizens to configure their devices in Catalan to appear as Catalan speakers in the digital sphere, as well as to choose search results in Catalan to express their linguistic preference.
