Tamil Search Engine

The Internet marks the era of Information revolution. The Internet has been largely dominated by English till recently. The importance of reaching out to non-English speakers around the globe has been felt increasingly and this has lead to the spread of other languages on the Internet. Tamil is the fastest growing language in Internet among the Indian languages. With the number of Tamil websites crossing the two thousand mark, the amount of information available in these websites grows exponentially with the time. Searching for the required Information in the Tamil websites become increasingly difficult if not impossible. Search directories and Search engines help to locate the required information from the Internet. Search directory is a manually created database where websites are categorized according to their subject content. Categorizing websites is a time consuming and a laborious task and therefore these search directories often lag behind what is currently available on the Internet. Search Engines circumvent the need of manual categorization by crawling the entire web by traversing through the hyperlinks. This paper presents the details about developing a highly efficient, full-fledged Tamil Search Engine. This search engine is first such attempt for Tamil or for any Indian language, though search directories are available for many Indian languages.