English is the main language spoken here in Technorati HQ, but you can also hear Japanese, Dutch, German ... even a little Yiddish! So we've had shpilkes to introduce some language filtering tools for a while now.
Tonight we rolled out the first one. You can now filter keyword searches by language! Just look at the top of the results column for a dropdown menu. We've filled it with the top 10 languages we see in the blogosphere right now (Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and of course All). We'll be adding more as we see them appear in the blogosphere.
This new feature is only in keyword searches for now, and it's still in beta. We think our algorithms for doing language detection work reasonably well, but there's still lots of room for improvement, and for giving you, the blogger, more control about specifying the language that your posts are in. We're working on additional features to really help tune and tweak the system, but we thought that what we had so far was useful enough that we wanted to share it with you, in the spirit of "release early, release often". So, as always, please let us know how we're doing.
