googlex.htm: Harnessing the web at large

portal.htm → dictiona.htm → machine_translation.htm → googlex.htm		Updated March/2009
Googlex by fravia+		Machine translation search lore

Da beef

Introduction

Explanations

Da beef
"Quick and dirty google delivery of a gazillion EU human-made translations"

Googlex		Version .09/03

input a (possibly long) searchstring in any EU-language, find quickly your targets through google and then fetch your results from the europa server or directly from google cache (which is often MUCH quicker than waiting the original server's page)

To better try the form out, input a more specific searchstring like Official Journal - 2008 - C 270 (and note the difference between the previous search and the use of the "I'm feeling lucky" option).
Also try global searches for more delicate stuff (for instance echelon spying system :-) and note that many "confidential" documents can be inferred... but will NOT appear in the SERPs.

EU official languages: BG ES CS DA DE ET EL EN FR GA IT LV LT HU MT NL PL PT RO SK SL FI SV

Introduction
"Celex is half-frozen, Eur-Lex is as slow as a turtle... can't we fetch all those juicy EU human translations nevertheless?"

Old intro
I originally developed this stuff many years ago, here the old introduction:

I have created the following masks in order to allow *anyone* to quickly fetch any EU (or United Nations') document, bypassing the labyrinthine slowness of the EU-servers and the clumsiness of their slow search engines. To know HOW TO QUICKLY FIND *any* legislation piece is part of the cosmic power of the seekers, and the EU proposals, directives and regulations have binding legislative power in 27 European states. Hence they MUST be translated in all the official languages. This is of PARAMOUNT importance for seekers because it opens an incredible wealth of human made (non machine) TRANSLATIONS. Thus, if you search for, say, "client side", you'll find out how to further widen your search using this same query term, on a local level through (almost) all other European languages. Going "local" (at least linguistically) has never been so easy.

Of course even simply knowing how to find a given legislative text is important: In all human societies, the abstruse formulations, ad absurdum proliferation (and technical complexity) of all kind of national and supranational laws are purposely pursued, in order to allow loopholes for the powerful and bondages for the unwashed. Nothing new under the sun: Corruptissima republica, plurimae leges :-)
Hence it could be useful, especially for all civil society and "grass root" organisations, to be able to check quickly and easily the laws that (are supposed to) rule a world "ubi sola pecunia regnat". Through the following masks any web-searcher (in fact, any reader) will be able to find for instance (almost) any EU legislative text trough google using words, numbers, text snippets or a combination of these elements. Everything on this page is client side, so you can just save this html file on your own box and use it at leisure wherever you are or might be.

I know that there are many agencies in the 27 member States of the EU that make money in order to "find" EU-laws for simpletons unable to search inside the legislative labyrinths.
Through these simple, free and GPLled very powerful masks I hope to contribute to put all such agencies out of work for ever :-)

New intro
Now, 7 years later, I can add that I am fairly proud to have devised this "googlex" (google+Eur-Lex) mask: despite its obvious simplicity, and despite the relative ameliorations of eur-lex's own search engine during the last 5 years (the advanced search is still quite cumbersome and awkward), it turned out to be an incredibly versatile and powerful translation web-tool, useful for anyone dealing with web-searches (and, more generally, translations). In fact, once found your target, if you choose to fetch the cached copy of google instead of the original Eur-Lex server document you'll kill two mustards with one stone (or cut two birds :-)
In fact you'll obtain an useful automatic contextual highlighting of your original searchstring AND you'll probably get the document itself much more quickly from the powerful GNU/Linux servers that google (and, alas, not the Microsoftish heavily lobbied EU) uses.

Some historical data aboout celex and eurlex
Also note that we are dealing with the EU-legistical database Eur-Lex here, which is derivated from the older internal database Celex (Communitatis Europeae LEX): the first version of CELEX became operational as an internal Commission service in 1971. The opening of the CELEX database to the other institutions and the public was accompanied by strong efforts to implement a multilingual approach by providing the database in all official languages.
Problem and glitches with multilinguistic coverage imposed the transfer of CELEX, in 1993, under the responsibility of the EU-Publications Office.
Following a European Parliament resolution of 19 December 2002 the access to the old "legal" database of the European institutions, CELEX, (Communitatis Europeae LEX) is free of charge from 1. July 2004.

Explanations
~ Introducing Goog-lex ~

This mask was originally prepared for a free-lance friend translator, but friends in the EU services found it useful, and it turned out to be quite useful for all translators of the planet as well.
Since it is also useful for general searching in foreign languages one doesn't happen to know, I deem it has a place on searchlores :-)

It basically limits google searches to the document indicized from the http://eur-lex.europa.eu server, harnessing the might (and the speed) of the "web at large" for our own terminological searching purposes.
It also gives back 100 (instead of the default 10) results per page and guarantees that no results regrouping algos will be applied.
Another filter imposes the UTF-8 charset (most accented characters are thus allowed as input)

~ You don't need to do diddly ~
You don't need to choose a language, you don't need to fill different fields, nor to choose any further option.
Nothing, nada, niente. Just input a (possibly long) searchstring in any language and fetch quickly your results.
Try for instance "equal treatment for men and women as regards access to employment, vocational training and promotion" (with or without quotes).

Clearly, if you are seeking something specific, you'll have to specify your string a little more, a simple date may do the job:
25 April 2001 "equal treatment for men and women as regards access to employment, vocational training and promotion"
will probably show among the first results the official journal you prolly were looking for.

Of course you can mix up text and numbers and then search using any numerical reference you like, for instance: Commission Regulation 1171/2001
(or Verordening 1171/2001 van de Commissie if you want -say- the Dutch version).

~ Less problems with accented characters and other "non kosher" signs ~
European languages have a startling quantity of funny accented characters.

In this version of googlex however, most accented characters are accepted.
Yet, at times, when you paste a long phrase taken somewhere inside the googlex mask, some "non kosher" characters may still be mis-recognized (coz of the iso-8859-1 charset).
If a search does not give results and you see -say- question marks instead of accented characters, use one asterisk instead of each offending term, for instance "résidus" and "présents" in the following search:
"limites maximales applicables aux * de pesticides * dans les produits"

You may also use more asterisks and omit the quotes in order to widen your search. For instance limites maximales applicables aux *** de pesticides *** produits

Alternatively, often a good solution, just search in English and then switch to your language of choice once the target document has been found.
In many cases this may be the best solution, especially for our Greek & Bulgarian citizens.

~ I'm feeling lucky ~
Google's famous "I'm feeling lucky" button works using a different algo and delivers "the result" you're looking for at once... provided you are lucky. Try 2008/C 101/01 for instance...

~ Woah! Can I really use this at home? ~
Of course. The whole point of this mask is to allow anybody to quickly access (almost) any EU-document, whenever and wherever.
Just save this html file on any folder inside your private harddisk.

~ Is that all? ~
Nope. For the joy of all arabic, chinese, russian, english, french and spanish web-seekers, linguists and translators we have also created googun, a similar mask, that zaps the United nations database.

~ Is that all? ~
Nope. In order to use a different index of EU-documents we have also created Yahoolex, thus offering a second DIFFERENT possibility to zap the EU-servers through yahoo's index and muscles (and cached pages).

~ Is that all? ~
Nope. master javascripter and searcher Ritz developed 4 years ago some "experimental" tools for bilingual display: bilingual_bookmarklets.htm.
They are still in fieri, be warned, but you can use them if you use/will use the powerful, good, free and quick Opera browser (a browser you should use anyway). This bilingual display cannot work with Microsoft explorer due to its (awful) proprietary code.

If you want a more "proper" (if slower) bilingual display, use instead Eurlex's own bilingual facility:
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/Notice.do?mode=dbl&lng1=en,es&lang=&lng2=bg,cs,da,de,el,en,es,et,fi,fr,hu,it,lt,lv,mt,nl,pl,pt,ro,sk,sl,sv,&val=486721:cs&page=1&hwords=Commission+Directive+2009%2F2%2FEC+of+15+January+2009+amending%7Efor+the+purpose+of+its+adaptation+to+technical+progress%7Efor+the+31st+time%7ECouncil+Directive+67%2F548%2FEEC+on+the+approximation+of+the+laws%7Eregulations+and+administrative+provisions+relating+to+the+classification%7Epackaging+and+labelling+of+dangerous+substances%7E
Note the mode=dbl&lng1=en,es, here for english into spanish.

~ Caveat emptor ~
Google does NOT seem to have indexed all document tiers inside the EU-servers, (though it went pretty deep inside). Or maybe they are just keeping the linguistic power of the whole lot reserved for their own translation experiments and tools.
The same applies to Yahoo's (different) index. So if you want completeness and absolute certainty, forget it: the tools above are "quick and dirty": they work, they are quick, but there's no guaranty of document retrieval completeness.
Moreover, Google's and Yahoo's indexing spiders have a two-weeks lap delay, which means that some of the most recent documents -while already accessible on the EU-servers- may not appear at all using googlex searches.
This kind of linguistic-mustard-cutting is still in fieri, so bear with us and use it for what it is worth.

fravia+, first published in 2005, updated @ searchlores in march 2009

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