THSearch: Thai-enable herbal search engine

Herbal information is a special type of information dealing with medicinal herbs. Several problems may be occurred when we use general-purpose search engines as a tool for finding herbal information on Internet. Firstly, they often give too many results and some results unrelated to the query. Secondly, several documents should be retrieved but not retrieve them due to limitation of technical terms especially those Web documents were written in Thai. Finally, it is hard to find the useful and unbiased information even well trained users. To solve these problems, Thai-enable search engine for herbal information (THSearch) is constructed. We use three strategies to improve our searching: (1) a list of useful Websites and their links are suggested by herbal specialists, (2) Thai word segmentation is used and technical terms in Thai about herbal information are added into the dictionary (3) a set of synonyms of these technical terms in both Thai and English is built for helping users from a lot of keywords of the same meaningful term. The result shows that THSearch is very useful and easy to use. It returns a useful information even using only one keyword.