Google has a lot of special keywords you can use in the query string to restrict the scope of the search. For example “filetype:” will restrict to particular types of documents, and “site:” will restrict to certain websites.
I want to know if there’s any such keyword to restrict the search to pages in a particular language. In a single sitting, I often have to perform searches in various languages, and it is rather tedious for me to go to the Advanced Search[/ur] page to select my preferred language from the drop-down list every time I want to change the target language. I would much rather just be able to add something like “lang:xx” or “lang:yy” to the end of my query, where “xx” or “yy” is one of the [url=http://sites.google.com/site/tomihasa/google-language-codes]codes used in the URL query string to restrict the search results.
Note: please don’t suggest that I (a) edit the URL query string, as this is just as inconvenient as navigating to the Advanced Search page; (b) use the site: keyword to restrict results to a particular country’s top-level domain, since there is not a one-to-one mapping of TLDs to languages, or (c) don’t try to use any language restriction method at all, because this often brings back pages I don’t want from closely related languages. (For instance, I often do Icelandic searches, and without restricting the search language I often get Danish or Faroese results, since many words and phrases are the same in these languages.)
I suppose one thing I could do is to make a set of bookmarklets which automatically append the correct lr= value to the URL query string, so that way I could type something like “gis foo” into my browser’s location bar for an Icelandic Google search, and “gde foo” for a German search, etc. But of course if Google already has something simpler built in, I’d rather use that, especially since it would work at any computer I happen to use.