Government and entities join forces to recover Catalan search engine results

The government has joined forces with several entities that promote the Catalan language to recover Catalan in search engine results pages (SERP). The cabinet claims the language has lost its positioning with Google, Bing, and other search engines.

On Thursday, the business and labor minister, Roger Torrent, and the digital policies secretary, Gina Tost, accompanied by Francesc Xavier, the linguistic policy secretary, met with these associations as part of a working group.

Their idea is to revert the trend which started in May 2022 and got worse late last of September.

The government findings are similar to what two experts told Catalan News recently, just days before Google acknowledged there was an issue.

As the cabinet explains, SERPs are showing more results in Spanish than Catalan, even if the user has all of its settings in the latter. The issue also affects other minority languages in Spain, such as Basque and Galician, and even international languages such as French, with fewer hits than in English.

"Even if we are now focused on search engine algorithms, it is clear that we have to work together in defense of the Catalan language in everything technology-related, from social media to streaming services, home appliances, cars, and voice assistants," Roger Torrent said during the meeting.