Selecting document and query languages
You can specify that only documents in specific languages are returned when you enter a query. You can also specify that the search engine process queries in a particular language.
By selecting a document language, you tell the search engine to return documents only in that specified language. The default setting is to return documents in all languages that match the query. The search engine automatically determines the language of each document that it crawls and performs linguistic analysis for many languages. This analysis results in higher search quality.
The query language is used to interpret the words in the query. Setting the query language helps the search engine analyze inflections and other word forms for a specific language. Therefore, it can return documents that contain the query terms in different forms. For example, if a query contains the term running, the search engine might return variations of this term such as run or ran. Typically, you get better results if the query language is the same as the language of the documents that you expect to find.
If you do not specify a query language in the Language Preferences window, the query language and spelling suggestions are defined by the language setting in your browser. For example, if your browser is configured to use French, any search queries are interpreted in French and spelling suggestions are made in French.
To select a document or query language:
The search engine automatically identifies the language of a document during indexing by a linguistic analysis of the text of the document. The language that the search engine identifies might differ from the language that is specified in document metadata. Mixed-language documents are assigned only one language.