Amharic-English Bilingual Search Engine

As non-English languages have been growing exponentially on the Web with the expansion of multilingual World Wide Web, the number of online non-English speakers who realizes the importance of finding information in different languages is enormously growing. However, the major general purpose search engines such as Google, Yahoo, etc have been lagging behind in providing indexes and search features to handle non-English languages. Hence, documents that are published in non-English languages are more likely to be missed or improperly indexed by major search engines. As a result, the need to develop bilingual search engine that handles the specific characteristics of the users’ native language query (Amharic) and retrieves documents in both Amharic and English languages becomes more apparent. In this work, we designed a model for an Amharic-English Bilingual Search Engine and developed a bilingual Web search engine based on the model that enables Web users for finding the information they need in Amharic and English languages.