Some search engine providers claim to support multiple languages if
they can handle and index documents written in different languages.
They search for the exact appearance of the entered search terms; e.g.
"war" finds English documents referring to military actions
but also finds German documents containing "war" in the sense
of "was" (i.e. a meaningless glue word). This is sometimes
called multilingual or multi-language search and is different from cross-language
search.
A true cross-language search is possible only if the search engine
is able to recognize the thematic content of a document, i.e. if the
system realizes that the English translation of a French (or a German,
etc.) document is equivalent to the original document. This advanced
technique is a key feature of InfoCodex. It simultaneously finds documents
in all supported languages, without the need for a cumbersome (and often
arbitrary) translation into each language. Because of the cross-language
content recognition and a well-founded similarity measure, the documents
can be ordered by their relevance to the search query.