Kerala - Pathanamthitta   

New search engine for Indian languages

Aasis Vinayak P.G. who has developed a new Internet search engine for Indian languages.

PATHANAMTHITTA: The invention of a low-powered water-drawing system by a schoolboy in Pathanamthitta hit the headlines three years ago. The 16-year-old science prodigy, Aasis Vinayak P.G, then received praise from the scientific community.

The then President of India A.P.J. Abdul Kalam had even personally met him during his tour of the State two years ago.

Now, Mr. Aasis, a fourth semester B.Sc. Physics student at Loyola College in Chennai, has again created history by developing an Internet search engine for Indian languages, which, he claims, is comparatively problem-free.

Unlike Google or Yahoo, the new search engine, http://mozhi.org, is a non-profit and non-commercial educational venture.

According to him, though Google, Yahoo and LIVE (MSN) search bots (spiders) may crawl Indian language sites, the way they index them is not proper and, more importantly, users cannot enter words in the particular language in search boxes.

In the case of some other Indian search engines, the user needs to have a virtual keyboard to enter words.

They do not support many popular browsers such as Firefox and the number of languages they support is little.

Here, with ‘Mozhi,’ no font installation is required. The user may need to enable Unicode support in their browser, if there is a problem in entering words,” says Mr. Aasis.

Mr. Aasis says any person with knowledge of Indian languages can join his project and he is ready to support scholars in oriental languages as well as web sites in Indian languages to search more effectively.

All coding associated with ‘Mozhi’ has been completed and the database has only a limited number of pages from the respective language editions of Wikipedia. Though the project concentrated on all South Indian languages, besides Hindi, Sanskrit, Bengali, Oriya and Punjabi, the coding could be made in other Indian as well as foreign languages too.

Mr. Aasis says ‘Mozhi’ would be of great help in searching newspapers, magazines in Indian languages, besides searching web sites, blogs and the Indian language editions of Wikipedia.

Researchers and scholars in Indian as well as foreign languages will find ‘Mozhi’ a boon as it enables them to search even ancient manuscripts.

However, he said conversion of text to soft format was required to activate this facility.

He said the job of listing keywords in all sites using Malayalam was under way. Users can contact at post@mozhi.org or post@aasisvinayak.com.

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