Abyssinica Technologies

Natural Language Processing and Cloud Solutions.

Abyssinica - The Amharic Search Engine

Abyssinica  Search Engine

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።


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 forየሕንጻ አወቃቀር" and if your website does not have any content about ሕንጻbut 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!


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