Normality has returned to internet searches that were done in Catalan and that, for reasons so far unknown, Google offered them in Spanish. A little over a year ago, even if the user had configured the devices with the Catalan language as priority, the search results led to pages in Spanish. That is to say, if someone searched for information on Google about a play in a specific theater, despite the fact that the website had information in Catalan and despite the fact that the browser was configured in Catalan, the first result offered was in Spanish
When this anomaly was detected, hypotheses ran high, but Google denied from the beginning that there had been any black hand that had manipulated the search parameters. The technological giant did acknowledge that some modifications had been made to the algorithm, but could not find any plausible explanation to justify this worrying loss of visibility of the Catalan language. Sources consulted by La Vanguardia point out that the entry of artificial intelligence into the parameters of the Google algorithm could have been the cause of this modification in the results. But they insist it's a guess.
The Alliance for the Catalan Digital Presence, which aims to achieve the normalization of the Catalan language in the digital sphere, had a lot to do with the rectification of this anomaly. Promoted by the Government of the Generalitat of Catalonia and made up of ten civil society entities, the Alliance has been working together with Google and other search engines for months so that web content in Catalan regains its visibility in searches.
The team of the Fundació .cat, coordinator of the Alliance, headed by Albert Cuesta and Pep Masoliver, "diagnosed the extent of the problem by analyzing the traffic of more than 600 web pages with content in Catalan and other languages and preparing a report published this June that made it possible to objectify and quantify the problem", they explain. Once this was done, "a technical dialogue was opened with the engineering departments of Google and Microsoft to resolve a malfunction that affected more languages and cultures in the world, but that no one had defined or quantified."
As a result of this work, which has facilitated dialogue with the IT giants, the result has been that "this August, Google has begun to apply changes to its algorithms and today we can confirm that the visibility of web content in Catalan has improved in a substantial way - explains the Alliance -. Specifically, it has been confirmed that in searches for an arbitrary set of descriptors that the Alliance periodically observes, the presence of Catalan pages among the first three results has more than doubled: a month ago they were only 24% while currently they are 57%".
Google issued a statement informing of the changes and improvements achieved where it mentioned the Alliance's collaboration throughout this process. "Over the last few months we have made a series of changes to better adjust the results to the language in which someone is searching. We are grateful to everyone who provided us with examples in different languages to test our improvements, including Catalan-speaking users and the Alliance for the Digital Presence of Catalan.” Language activist and Wikipedian Àlex Hinojo emphasizes that "having established this dialogue with Google is very important". But the .cat Foundation reminds us that we must continue to be on the lookout, because today changes are very fast.
