With its unprecedented growth over the past 10 years, the Internet has made the world a true global village. However, much of the online information is still divided and separated by languages. For instance, before Tyloon’s initiative, nationwide U.S. business information was available only in English and could not be searched in other languages, such as Chinese and Spanish. If one tried searching for “attorney” or “car repair” in Chinese characters on commercial search engines such as Google or Yahoo, almost all of the search results one got were located in China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan, but very few locations within the U.S. This was due primarily to the fact that Chinese websites in America are limited and Google and Yahoo web crawlers have no way of collecting nationwide American business information in the Chinese language or any other foreign language.

Such language barriers mean there is no inter-convertibility of data into different languages and this severely restricts the quantum of information available to the user on the Internet. Mainstream commercial search engines currently don’t have an effective solution to this problem. Although, they have free online translation services that allow a visitor to easily translate an English web page into other languages, getting the relevant English language webpage is itself not feasible if the user doesn’t understand English. Furthermore, machine translated results are still frequently unreadable.

Tyloon sees this as a huge business opportunity that it will capitalize on by offering a local search engine that allows visitors to surf nationwide business information in several languages. Both the United States and Canada are countries that are rich in linguistic diversity. According to related statistics, Spanish-speaking people account for 22% of the U.S. population while Asians account for around 5%. Spanish is the most widely spoken foreign language in U.S.A. while Chinese is the second most frequently used foreign language here. In Canada, Chinese is the most spoken foreign language after the official languages, which are English and French. In Southern California, around 50% of the population is Latino, and Southern California also houses the biggest Chinese community in North America.

To serve non-English speaking communities, the traditional way is to build a business directory or a yellow pages website specifically for that community, which is why there are Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Japanese and other yellow pages in the U.S.  Unfortunately, they only cater to their own communities and their information databases are limited to data relating to the communities they serve.  This makes it difficult for foreign language speaking people to seek nationwide business information in their respective languages.  Likewise, the English-speaking population has difficulty in getting information about businesses that speak a language other than their own.

One of the unique features of Tyloon.com is that it is the first and only nationwide multilingual local search engine that both English speakers and non-English speakers can use to search for in-depth U.S. business information.

There are other local search engines and yellow pages websites that have so called “multilingual support”, but for them the concept is totally different. To these search engines, multiple languages mean different databases, multi-data feeds, or multi-information “pipelines”. This means that each database or data feed can still be searched in one language only, so it isn’t truly multilingual at all. That’s why when a user switches from one language to another on these websites, she is actually redirected to the homepage of another language.

Tyloon.com is the only “Single Pipeline” multilingual local search engine in the world that enables different language groups to search the same database, so they can switch to a different language in any category of Tyloon.com without losing the page they are reading.  This makes Tyloon’s “Single Pipeline” multilingual local search worthwhile and truly multi-lingual.

While it serves the needs of both its English and non-English speaking users perfectly, Tyloon.com could unite the diverse communities in the United States and Canada on a single platform because people from different language groups now search the same business database albeit in different languages.  This makes it easier for companies to advertise in and tap niche markets along with mainstream ones by simply translating their product/service descriptions into various languages.