I18N in long means Internationalization which in short means multiple languages. Well of late I have not seen any domain names that are as of yet internationalized and I am not with it because it means that the domain names will be restricted to only a smaller section of people who know the language to make sense out of it.

Google Webmaster tools though now allow you to add Internationalized Domain Names in Applications ^[1] (IDNA) in their system. Though this is a great thing I would definitely won’t want to visit a domain name without me being able to decipher what it means in the first place.

Here is a example of the domain name http://北京大学.cn/ (Peking University). Seeing this domain I would not understand what exactly it stands for, so Google should also come up with a reverse domain search from any language to any language such that all such results are reliable to the end user without them having to worry about not knowing the language of the domain name.

I have some problems loading the above domain because of my Locale Settings but will try it out on a machine which runs Chinese Locale and see if I can load this site using Firefox and IE7. On loading the site in IE7 the site was loaded as “xn--1lq90ic7fzpc.cn/” without the quotes and I am not sure if this is the right site.

Head to the official blog ^[2] to know more about the Google Webmaster changes.