Search engine for Amharic Web content

Abstract

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.