A reader sent in a comment about the LinguaWeb search, which is a bilingual, Bahasa Melayu and English search engine. For those outside of Southeast Asia, Bahasa Melayu is a language spoken in Malaysia. It’s a Malaysian specific dialect of Malaya which is part of a broader language group spoken in Singapore, Indonesia, and East Timor. Bahasa Melayu is a localized language and only represents a small part of the world population. However as more Bahasa Melayu-speakers start logging on, they can become a specialized segment worth optimizing for.

LinguaWeb is unique in that it utilizes the Alexa search engine and performs an automatic computer generated translation of the results and related websites into Bahasa Melayu. It’s just like Altavisa’s Babblefish, expect of course babblefish doesn’t support Bahasa Melayu. Currently the market penetration of LinguaWeb isn’t all that spectacular but is sure to grow, and other search methods like it are also likely to grow.

Optimizing your website for bilingual, computer generated translation search engines isn’t all that difficult because most of the work is identical to your current SEO strategy with the translation being done on the search engine side. My recommendation is to use simple sentences which will also improve readability and to avoid idioms, because they almost never translate correctly.

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