I stumbled across an eWeek story about Cross-Language Enterprise Search, launched last month on Google Code. It's an add-on for the Google Appliance that translates both your searches and your search results between 34 languages.

It's a compelling idea -- what if you want to include all those Japanese documents on your intranet, but don't speak Japanese? Well, Google will translate your keywords, search on the translations, too, and even show translations of the results. (You can try for yourself how this works on Google Translate.) Or, as Google is quoted as saying, "this is analogous to giving every employee in a business 34 translators sitting at their desk and translating everything they want to look for within a 10th of a second."

Of course, in reality, it isn't quite as good as that sounds. I wouldn't have enough space here to describe all the potential problems of machine translations and search; let me suffice by saying, as the service translated it from Dutch for me, "Google is an end, but although it is not bad Translate here knows how to bake, the result mainly funny." (That's what came out when I input in Dutch, "Although Google Translate is pretty good, results are still mostly funny.")

And you can multiply the funny factor a few times if you use these translations to search on.

Another issue here is that both the code released through Google Enterprise Labs, and the Translate service this project uses, are unsupported beta. That means there's no support, and no guarantees. In this particular case, for instance, the actual translations are done by the Translate API (which is "in the cloud"), accessed by JavaScript running in the user's browser. That means all of the searches and results boldly go where they have never gone before, and if you're not careful, your secure documents will suddenly be passed over HTTP along a series of tubes.

It's interesting to see, though, that there's something of a nascent ecosystem supporting the Google Appliance with bits of code like this, extending the basic functionality of the Appliance. That doesn't mean you should consider these modules to be actual "features" available as functionality out-of-the-box. Caveat emptor: check before you buy!