Search engine for Amharic Web content

Nowadays search engines provide the easiest way to reach information resources that are available on the Web. The use of languages other than English has been growing exponentially on the Web. Amharic language belongs to one of these languages. Web documents in Amharic language are increasing very fast. The number of Internet users in Ethiopia is growing dramatically. Nevertheless, the major search engines have been lagging behind in providing search features to handle this language. Therefore, a Web search engine that considers the typical characteristics of the Amharic language is needed. In this paper, we present our design and implementation of a search engine system for Amharic language Web documents. The search engine helps users to search Amharic documents of their interest on the Web. This engine allows indexing and searching of Amharic documents written in multiple encoding representations. The crawler, indexer and query engine are the basic components of this search engine that considers the typical characteristics of the Amharic language.

I. Introduction

The Web is a vast collection of completely uncontrolled heterogeneous documents. Existing search engines provide assistance to users in locating the relevant information they need from the Web. Over the last decade, the WWW has become a major source of information. Although English is still the dominant language on the Web, information in other languages is steadily gaining prominence. The use of languages other than English has been growing exponentially on the Web. Data provided in [6] indicate that in June 2007 the percentage of English language users on Internet was only 31.2% as compared to 45% in June 2001 [2]. This figure implies that there are a great number of non-English language contents on the Web, which in tum shows the need for more attention to non-English documents on the Web.