Examining The Effect Of Language Proficiency On Multilingual Search Results

A side effect of the growing Internet population is that the number of polyglot users, i.e. people who are proficient in more than one language, is also increasing. Even though the internet has been made more accessible throughout the world, search engines have seen little improvements to help polyglot users. To better support these individuals, this thesis presents an analysis of multilingual search results list that would be provided by a search engine. In order to populate the result list, crowdsourcing is used in order to get real world queries that people actively searched for. The results show that users are able to determine if the search result is relevant or not faster when the search result is in their primary language and it takes them longer when the result is in their secondary language. The results are discussed in terms of language proficiency as well as whether a user can make a good judgement about their language proficiency.