Have you ever found yourself in a foreign country, wishing you knew how to say "I'm lost!" or "I'm allergic to peanuts”? The Internet and services like Google Translate can help—but what if you don't have a connection?

Today we're launching offline language packages for Google Translate on Android (2.3 and above) with support for fifty languages, from French and Spanish to Chinese and Arabic.


While the offline models are less comprehensive than their online equivalents, they are perfect for translating in a pinch when you are traveling abroad with poor reception or without mobile data access.


So go out and explore another language or another culture without worrying about Internet access. There’s a whole world offline out there.

Posted by Minqi Jiang, Associate Product Manager

Ask a question, get an answer. But what happens in between? Last year we released an animated site that illustrates an email's journey to friends and family around the world. Today we're releasing a similar website called How Search Works.



Here you can follow the entire life of a search query, from the web, to crawling and indexing, to algorithmic ranking and serving, to fighting webspam. The site complements existing resources, including this blog, the help center, user forums, Webmaster Tools, and in-depth research papers.

A few things you'll find:

• An interactive, graphical explanation of Google Search
• A view into major search algorithms and features
• A 43-page document explaining how we evaluate our results
• A live slideshow of spam as we remove it
• Graphs illustrating the spam problem and how we fight it
• A list of policies that explain when we'll remove content

We hope the site helps to illuminate the split-second journey from algorithms to answers. The animated site is available today in English and there's also a text-only version in 43 languages.

Posted by Jake Hubert, Product Manager