Press Trust Of India Posted online: Sunday, April 24, 2005 at 1208 hours IST Updated: Monday, April 25, 2005 at 0953 hours IST
Chennai, April 24: After developing the world's first search engine for Tamil language websites, city-based Anna University-K B Chandrasekar (AUKBC) Foundation is now in the process of developing an internet search engine for Hindi.
"We are at the second stage (alpha level) of the development of Hindi search engine," S Bhaskar, a research scientist at the language technologies division of the foundation, told PTI.
The language technologies division, which comprises of 16 research scientists, last year developed a search engine for Tamil websites, which can do both site specific and web searches.
Bhaskar said the Hindi search engine, perhaps a first of this sort, would be ready in the coming months. Now, only 'webduniya.com' possess a Hindi search engine.
The Hindi search engine would search the contents of several Hindi websites to produce a result, which is not possible in the existing search engines.
The foundation is a novel private-public initiative, where the land was provided by the university and the initial seed capital of Rs 7 crore from Chadrasekhar who belongs to the 1983 batch of Madras Institute of Technology.
The foundation, Bhaskar said, was also looking at developing internet search engines in other languages like Malayalam, Telegu and Kannada.
The AUKBC was now self-sufficient by earning handsome revenues through the various research products. For instance, the Tamil language search engine 'Kazhugu' (Tamil for eagle), which was hosted on the Sify website, generates income for the foundation.
The AUKBC foundation had, earlier, developed a news aggregator tool, which was also used by Sify in Hindi, Tamil and Telegu.
Titled 'Swayambu', the tool is a self-generating newspaper in these four languages, Bhaskar said.
Another development by the foundation was the 'translingual information accessor' which can search classified matrimony advertisements based on key words and give the results after translation into Tamil.
Though the search will be done on English language also, the user gets the results in Tamil.
