Google is doing a lot of things to improve the way they rank sites across all of the different languages of the world. Some examples of where improvements are being made include taking into consideration things like:

- Spell corrections
- Diacrtical marks
- Synonyms
- Compounding
- Stemming

If only it were just that simple. I find the concept of how they do this stuff fascinating, but quite frankly it is so complicated to me, it makes my head hurt thinking about all of the things that would go into the improvements. Google Blog Engineering Director Daphne Dembo goes into much more detail at the Official Google blog, but I'll just let you read that stuff there. She concludes, however:

All in all, Google Search is being actively developed for more than 100 languages, in 150+ countries, with dozens of improvements launched each month. So far I've covered the basics of how international search works, but this is just the surface of all the international work we do. There are many other interesting topics that impact international markets like usability, homepage and results page layout, and connectivity. An understanding of real cultural and human factors is essential to creating a search engine that resonates with the people who use it. (Click on the image to see a larger version.)

I'll say this much. This is definitely important work for Google to be doing to truly dominate the search engine industry all over the world. Here in America, we often take for granted that Google's not the head honcho everywhere in the world. China for example, prefers Baidu. The more improvements Google continues to make at an international level, the stronger the company's future will be around the globe.