LBi London

Posted by Ian Macfarlane February 22nd, 2010

Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) have been approved by ICANN and are set to become a reality. Are the search engines prepared for them?

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Introduction

Note: If you are unable to view the Chinese and Arabic letters in this page you may need to install the required fonts.

In October 2009, ICANN voted to allow the use of non-ASCII characters in domain names. Non-ASCII characters have existed within domain names for a while – for example, many Hong Kong sites feature Chinese characters (example: http://香港儒釋道院.組織.hk). However, before now, these characters were not allowed within TLDs and, as such, URLs still required ASCII characters (in the example above, the ccTLD “.hk”).

ICANN launched the IDN ccTLD Fast Track Process in November, and last month announced that four top-level IDNs had successfully passed the initial stage of approval (three Arabic-language IDN ccTLDs for Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and one Cyrillic-language IDN ccTLD for the Russian Federation). At the time of writing, there are another 13 IDN ccTLDs on their way through this process, representing 10 different languages in total.

In order to provide the Internet community time to prepare for the rollout of new IDN domains, ICANN has set up a number of IDN domains for testing purposes. Each of these test domains is written as “example.test” in it’s respective language, and content has been made available to view on each site.

Seeing as most of the initial IDN ccTLDs are likely to be in Arabic, I have used ICANN’s test Arabic domain (مثال.إختبار) for my research.

Before I start, I need to quickly explain what Punycode is, as it it used to support the addition of IDN domains to the existing Internet infrastructure. The problem with the current system is that the Domain Name System (DNS) only allows certain ASCII characters, which means that it is not possible to simply add Unicode characters to it. Punycode was invented to get around this issue. Essentially, it is a method by which Unicode characters can be translated to (and from) the ASCII characters allowed within the DNS. When your browser requests a domain name containing Unicode characters, it converts it to the ASCII-formatted Punycode before sending the request.

For this experiment, I have looked at the way in which the search engines handle both the Unicode form of the Arabic domain (http://مثال.إختبار/) as well as the corresponding Punycode format (which, in this case, is http://xn--mgbh0fb.xn--kgbechtv/). Note that, because Arabic is an RTL (right-to-left) language, pages on this site will have the URL path to the left of the hostname, rather than to the right.

One last note before we look at the results – the test page does not feature a meta description tag, so any snippet text is likely to come from text within the page itself.

Here are the results.

Google

Searching Google for the Unicode variant of the URL returns the homepage of the domain as the first result, with an additional nested result for a second, internal page on the domain:

 

Initially, everything seems to be in place here. The title tags, snippets and URLs are correctly displayed in Arabic, and Google has highlighted the search text in bold as usual. Additionally, the “Similar” pages link works, and the “jump to” successfully takes you to an anchor within the page. Lastly, the URL path is written in the correct RTL form for the second result.

However, not all is well. The first URL that Google is listing, the homepage, is actually a 301 redirect to an internal page. Google should be indexing the destination page, not the redirecting homepage.

There are several other issues too. Firstly, the cached copy link did not work:

I tried a number of pages on the site and Google’s cached copy did not work for any of them, so Google may have an issue with this feature at present.

Additionally, the “Translate this page” links for both results do not correctly function, and an error message is shown:

Side note – the “See original page” link does correctly point to the Arabic domain name.

Next I tried searching Google for the Punycode form of the URL:

Google has returned the same two URLs, which is a good sign of consistency. The title tags are the same, and the URL is still written in Arabic and not displayed in the Punycode form.

This time around, Google has picked out some text on the page which matches the Punycode search term. Although this particular snippet is rather less attractive than the ones from the previous query, matching the exact text on a page is probably the best approach. However, it would also make sense for Google to at least highlight the Unicode version (for example, in the URL), which it currently does not do.

Again, while the “Similar” pages link works, the “Cached” and “Translate this page” links are broken. This seems to be an issue that Google needs to fix.

Yahoo!

Searching Yahoo! for the Unicode or Punycode version of the URL does not return any results from the domain:

Similarly, entering the URLs within Yahoo! Site Explorer simply redirects back to the main Yahoo!
search results. Performing “site:” searches (for either variant) also fails (looking at the HTTP headers, you can see that Yahoo! actually redirects the query to Site Explorer, which then redirects you back to the standard web search results).

I tried a few additional ICANN test IDN domains in other languages and none of them worked. Yahoo! seems to fail completely at handling IDNs.

Given that Yahoo! is likely to use Bing’s search in the future, let’s see how Bing performs next.

Bing

Searching Bing for the Unicode version of the URL does return a page from the site, although it’s at position 8, which is not ideal (when searching for a URL you would usually want the URL to appear at or near the top of the search results). The snippet appears as follows:

Only one URL is shown, which isn’t quite as useful as Google’s result, but is still adequate. The title tag, snippet and URL are all correctly shown in Arabic, which is good. The “Translate this page” and “Cached page” links both work, whilst they didn’t on Google.

Bing does have some issues, however. Although Bing has indexed the destination URL (the link goes directly to the destination URL), for some reason Bing only displays the URL of the homepage in the snippet. Additionally, although Bing has highlighted the domain in bold in the snippet, it has not highlighted it within the URL.

Bing does have a number of problems with its handling of this domain. However, they are fairly minor and definitely less important than the issues that Google has with this site.

Searching Bing for the Punycode version of the URL, Bing returns the URL at position 2 instead, which is a bit better:

Again, like Google, Bing has picked out the text from the page which matches the query for the snippet but has not highlighted the Arabic equivalent in the snippet. Otherwise, this result is much the same as the Unicode search variant.

Ask Jeeves

I have also looked at Ask Jeeves (known as just “Ask” in the US).

Searching Ask Jeeves for the Unicode version of the URL returns the site at position one. Like Google, it includes a second indented URL at position two. Interestingly, these are the same two URLs that Google returned for this search (it is worth remembering that Ask Jeeves might be using Google’s results at times).

Ask Jeeves is correctly displaying both the title and the snippet in Arabic, but the URL is written in the Punycode form instead, which is clearly far from ideal.

There is another major issue with Ask Jeeves’ implementation – the second URL goes through a redirect, but the hostname given by the redirect has been encoded in a way which makes Firefox and Internet Explorer fail to load the page (Google Chrome and Opera did successfully load the page from the redirect). Note: This does not always happen – reloading the page sometimes returns the URL without the redirect, and in this case it works correctly.

Searching Ask Jeeves for the Punycode version of the URL results in much the same as we have seen earlier. Again, the snippet includes the text from the page which matches the query. Ask Jeeves includes a small screenshot of the page too:

Ask Jeeves’ binoculars feature, which displays a small thumbnail screenshot of the site, does appear to work correctly. However, it is possible that there are issues here as well.

Although it’s difficult to make out due to the small size of the thumbnail, it appears that the English text renders correctly but the Arabic text (although correctly displayed in an RTL fashion) looks like it might be showing a nonsense placeholder character, in the same way that web browsers which do not render Unicode characters do. That said, it is difficult to determine for sure from the small thumbnail that Ask Jeeves provides.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Google, Bing and Ask Jeeves do support IDNs to varying degrees. If I had to proclaim a winner at the moment, I would say that Bing had a slight lead, but all of these search engines had some issues. Hopefully these issues will be ironed out by the time that IDNs eventually roll out en-masse.

Yahoo! appears to completely fail to support IDNs at present. Once it switches to Bing’s search engine, however, we assume that it will inherit all of Bing’s IDN support as well.

Tags: ask, domains, Google, international, keywords, language, Microsoft, research, search, SEO, yahoo!

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