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Abyssinica - Analyze, index, and search Amharic digital contents, texts, files, and paper documents.
አቢሲኒካ - የአማርኛ ፍለጋ አውታር። ሰነዶችን፣ ዶሴዎችን፣ የወረቀት ሰነዶችን መተንተን፣ ማለ፟ብ እና መፈለግ።
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A Search Engine is a
software system that searches the data-source for information based on search
terms. The data-source could be web, database, or set of documents. Search
Engines use complex algorithms to take your search query and return results
that are usually quite relevant to your search. Popular examples of search
engines are Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
A Search Engines
functionality is not just a simple word by word search. When a person performs
a search, the Search Engine scours its corpus of documents and returns only
those results that are relevant or useful to the searcher's query and ranks the
results according to the popularity and relevancy factors.
There are many
factors influence relevance, relevance aren’t determined manually. Instead, the
Engines employ mathematical equations (algorithms) to sort the relevant content
from the chaff, and then to rank the content in order of quality.
Search Engines apply
different language processing tools to analyze the content written in specific
language. For example, “የሕንጻ አወቃቀር”
and “የግንብ አሰራር”
are literally different but conceptually similar. Search engines understand
such conceptual similarity while analyzing documents.
Language Analysis is
curtail when developing a Search Engine. For Semitic languages like
Amharic, language morphological analysis is extremely complex as compared to
English. For example, in English language, run, runs, ran, running, runner are derivatives of the same lexeme ‘run’. In
general, derivatives of an English lexeme are way less than hundred in number,
where as in Amharic, a single word could be derived to thousands of other words. Other difficulty in Amharic Morphology is a translation of a single Amharic word could be a sentence in English. Eg. The Amharic word ባይሳካልኝም could be translated as even if
I am not successful in English.
As of now, none of
popular Search Engines can analyze Amharic very well. That is why we invent Abyssinica!
Today, because of
Search Engines are not capable of analyzing Amharic contents, they provide
search results which are not appropriate (age
and culture) to users. Sadly, irrelevant Amharic
contents (including dirty words) have been indexed and well ranked by
such Search Engines. Imagine a kid learning Amharic Alphabet typing a character
in a Search Engine sees a dirty word as a suggestion.
Millions of Amharic
documents and files have been accumulated in
organizations. Manually searching a document may take days and
days, and a tedious process, sometimes documents may not be found.
Abyssinica Search
Engine is capable of analyzing, indexing and searching digital contents,
paper documents, pdfs, web contents, etc. written in Amharic,
English or other Ethiopic languages. Abyssinica also aims to
eventually clean the Amharic web search by providing Ethiopian culture, and age
appropriate search results.
Abyssinica utilizes
native Amharic Language Processing Software like Amharic Morphology Analyzers, EthiopicOCR,
and Translators. Abyssinica Custom Search for websites provides relevant and
contextualized information to your website users. For example, If your website
user searches for “የሕንጻ አወቃቀር" and if your website does not have any content about ‘ሕንጻ’ but a page about “የግንብ አሰራር”, then the
page about “የግንብ አሰራር”
will be provided as a search result. Please see Abyssinica Custom Search in
Action applied on Amharic and Geez languages on EthiopicBible.com.
Abyssinica
Dictionary for Web, Mobiles, and Microsoft
Office are other related products of Abyssinica and available for
free.
Although
Abyssinica is capable of crawling and analyzing the entire Amharic web
content like Bing and Google do, we are very careful about the
content convenience and usefulness to users, since the internet is not rich
enough in providing relevant Amharic contents yet. At this time our higher
priority is to focus on providing knowledge resources to our users. So,
currently, Abyssinica Web Search crawls and analyzes few knowledge resource
sites like the Amharic Wikipedia. If you are a website owner and you feel your
website could be a knowledge source for users, please contact us to include
your website in the Abyssinica Web Search.
Start
using Abyssinica now!