Searching Europeana

Search and retrieval of the records stored at Europeana is a very interesting exercise. Consider the platform first, it is a federated archive where the records are decentralized and consequently managed at the local nodes. How each node implements search is a guess. Results vary depending on the language in which one performs the search. Here's some numbers from yesterday's evening exercise.

• Germany provides 106820 entries cataloged as "Kirche" - Italy does 752 items
• when cataloged as "Église", then Germany provides 68086 entries
• for "chiesa", scores for Italia-Germania 6786-68061
• for "bambini", Italia-Germania 4197-2
• for "kinder", Italia-Germania 3-7789.

The quality of the preview also changes, in some cases, thumbnails are available whilst they are not for other cases. It is hard to understand where the responsibility lies for generating such thumbnails.

I wonder whether results also depend on the user interface language of choice.