Nearly Half of Pages Google Indexes use Unicode

January 28th, 2010, 2:37 pm

According to a recent Google note, just shy of 50% of the pages Google indexes are reporting a Unicode character encoding. Web pages can use a variety of different character encodings, like ASCII, Latin-1, or Windows 1252 or Unicode. Most encodings can only represent a few languages, but Unicode can represent thousands: from Arabic to Chinese to Zulu. Increased support for Unicode around the web means Google (and others) can work on support for more languages.