Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Mystery: A Maltese Function in Google? Where is Sam Spade when you need him? I just did a routine Google search from the Firefox toolbar... While scanning the site summaries it retrieved, I noticed that the Google screen itself looked a little different. (There it is, on the right.) The old familiar "Google Search" and "I'm feeling lucky" buttons became "Fittex bil-Google" and "Inhossni Xxurjat." (I'm saving that last word for my next game of polyglot Scrabble. Maybe Nora Ephron would be interested.) Every word except "Google" and "Web" had turned into alphabet soup of a flavor unfamiliar to me. I loaded up Safari, Apple's non-Microsoft, non-Firefox browser, to see if Google was behaving strangely in general, or just in my copy of Firefox. Google looked fine via Safari, and I noticed in the fine print that "Language tools" was the translation of that third line on the right of my mystery screen, "Għodda Lingwistika." (Among the "languages" listed are "Klingon," "Pig Latin,""Elmer Fudd" and "Hacker.") To make my location even cleaner, back in Firefox I noticed the tell-tale word "Malti" under the Google name plate and, when I scrolled the screen down a bit, the two-part line, " Kullma trid tkun taf fuq Google - Google.com in English." A little more poking around confirmed that I had been, in fact, looking at a screen with Google's menus in the language of Malta (the country, not the too-sweet beverage). How I got there, I have no idea. The only clue I have is that last night I fell asleep listening to a podcast of an old radio series about Sam Spade, and the episode in question was a sequel to The Maltese Falcon. I'm not saying that had any influence on Google, but the Web works in mysterious ways. Note: Any frustrated Nora Ephron fans should note that the Scrabble-related link on her name above leads to an article about her addition to a game called Scrabble Blitz. Times Select is the pay-per-view section of the New York Times website, but some students, faculty and alumni may not be aware that it is free to users registered with a ".edu" e-mail address. 3:09:01 PM    comment []

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