India launched monolingual search engine SANDHAN for the tourism domain in five Indian languages on Thursday.
With the launch of SANDHAN in Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu, the country expects to narrow down the converse gap that exists in the search of tourism information in English.
Department of Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY) Secretary J Satyanarayana launched the search engines and said the real success would come at a time when India will develop village level e-services in local languages.
“This will fill the wide gap that exists in fulfilling the information needs of Indians not conversant with English- estimated at 90% of the population,” he said in an official statement.
SANDHAN, a project put together by Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) and a flagship programme of DeitY, has been developed by 120 researchers of 12 institutions over a period of six years. Primarily launched for the use in tourism domain, the search engine can also be used for businesses and academic purposes.
SANDHAN has the ability to process information on its languages and can retrieve information from only that language. It also generates a summary for every single search which makes it easy for the readers to get information without opening the same. It gives the user the flair to enter queries with the help of in-script keyboard or phonetic keyboard.
