GUWAHATI, Feb 4 - Sandhan, the indigenous search engine for Indian languages web search, is coming up within a few months.
�Sandhan will cater to the needs of the general public as well as the government for implementing IT as a tool for social change and development,� said Keshab Mahanta, Minister of Information Technology. He inaugurated the National Meet on Cross Lingual Information Access organised by the Department of Information Technology, Gauhati University this morning.
The meet is being attended by research groups from IIT Bombay, IIT Kharagpur, IIIT Hyderabad, IIIT Bhubaneswar, Jadavpur University, Anna University-CEG, Anna University-KBC, CDac-Pune, CDac-Noida, ISI-Kolkata, DAIICT-Gandhinagar, and Gauhati University.
The prototype version of the search engine, developed at the initiative of the Union Ministry of Electronics and IT, was demonstrated in front of the Minister and officials of local IT department. Minister Mahanta emphasised availability of local language contents in the web. �Once Sandhan is up in the digital media, there will be a demand for local language contents, as people will start searching local language contents through it. We have to generate and develop local language contents, and we all, at government level, public and academics, must be involved in content generation,� he added.
The meeting was attended by GU Vice Chancellor Dr Mridul Hazarika; Prof Manab Deka and MK Yadava, MD of AMTRON. Prof Pushpak Bhattacharjya, Director of IIT Patna was the guest of honour. He spoke on the Indian language search engine and importance of Cross Lingual Information Access in relation to the multilingualism of the Indian society.
It may be mentioned that the Sandhan search engine includes also Assamese searching, with Prof Shikhar Sarma heading the Assamese group of researchers and developers for Sandhan-Assamese.
At present Sandhan includes nine Indian languages � Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telegu, Punjabi, Gujarati and Oriya.
