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Comment by 1718627440 | Hacker News Reader

You should consider filtering by input language. Showing the same Wikipedia article in different languages is not helpful when I am searching in English. Also you may unify by entries by URL, it shows the same URL, just with different publish dates, which is interesting and might be useful, but should maybe be behind a toggle, as it is confusing at first.

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Great feedback, agree I need to filter here. Some website localization is very hard to work around, because they will try to geo-locate the IP address of your bot and redirect it accordingly to a given language...

The issue I was having was with the query "term+wikipedia" it then shows the wikipedia article in Czech, Hungarian, Russian, some kind of Arab and other before finally showing the English version. Then also a lot of that occur 2,3,4+ times with the same URL, just differing in crawltime by a few minutes.

It's a difficult problem to fix, you can set an Accept-Language header on crawl requests but his only works if the target website uses "Content Negotiation." Some sites ignore headers and determine language based on the IP address (Geo-IP) or the URL structure (e.g., /es/ vs /en/), basically a mess...

I don't get the problem you claim. You crawl something and get a document in whatever language the site delivers you. You know the language of that document with the lang=... attribute of the document. What results you show for a given language is under your control and not influenced by what the crawled site chose to serve to the crawler.

I'm working on the language improvements presently, but I need to clean out a lot of bad entries in my index. In essence what I am trying to say is many servers ignore "Accept-Language" so you have to rely on other means of detecting the language of the page reliably, e.g. inspecting the body content of the response. It's a non-trivial problem online.

So html lang=... is wrong, or doesn't exist?

> I am trying to say is many servers ignore "Accept-Language"

I wouldn't have expected that to be a hard rule, more like if there are multiple pages to return to have a factor, which one the user most likely wants.

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