Google's translation search engine, which was announced at the Searchology event, is now live, letting you set your language preferences for your search query, and receiving a list of results that have been translated to that language.
How does it work? Once you've set your language preferences (i.e. English to Spanish), you type in your search query and Google will translate the query to Spanish, and translate those web pages back to English. The search results show side by side, and the origin (Spanish) search results can be hidden, if you'd like. While there are the expected issues for an auto-translation service, it works as well as you'd expect. Google only translates text, and not characters, so there are sometimes a few barriers when it comes to translating a Chinese website effectively.
As useful as the service aims to be, I'm much happier with entering my search query as always, and utilizing the "translate this page" option if need be. This is a tool I wish Technorati could also integrate somehow, as many of its search results come in a variety of languages. It's also disheartening that the translation search engine is not yet integrated with the classic Google home page, and isn't that easy to find, either. Granted, Google's translation engine is still in beta, though Google doesn't seem to mind that 90 percent of its services go unrecognized by the average person.