KeralaNext.com (www.keralanext.com) announced on November 3 that a Tamil Nadu university has developed a multilingual Internet search engine, touted to be the first in an Indian regional language. Called Kazhugu, the search engine has been developed by Anna University's K.B. Chandrasekar Research Centre (www.au-kbc.org) and is capable of searching all the Tamil websites, despite the difference in the fonts they use.
A 10-member team of the university's language technologies group began work on the search engine in August 2000, the university said. The team has developed a trans-lingual information accessing tool, which can search classified matrimonial advertisements in other languages, based on keywords and give the results after translating it into Tamil. The search will also be done on English language websites but the user gets the results in Tamil.
The new search engine will be tested on the Sify portal (www.sify.com) and will be marketed commercially by the KBC Research Foundation, a marketing company floated for the purpose.
S. Bhaskar, a member of the team that developed the application, said that Beta testing of Kazhugu will begin soon, and that the university research team is planning to introduce similar Internet search engines for other languages like Hindi, Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada.
