EusBila, a search service designed for the agglutinative nature of Basque

The performance of major search engines for Basque is far from satisfactory, partly due to the agglutinative nature of the language –it is commonly known that search engines do not perform well with such languages– and partly because it is not a language to which search engines restrict their results. In this paper we present EusBila, a search service for Basque that relies on the APIs of search engines, yet obtains a lemma-based and language-filtered search by means of morphological query expansion and language-filtering words. It is a cost-effective approach, which we think can be used for other agglutinative or minority languages. We also evaluate how well EusBila performs when carrying out a Basque query, and we compare this performance to that of a major search engine in terms of precision and recall, thus demonstrating that EusBila is a very valid solution.