Design and Implementation of Amharic Search Engine

The Web is a huge repository of information in the form of text, image, audio, and video. People use search engines, such as Google, Yahoo!, etc, to discover resources from this huge repository. These general purpose search engines are designed and optimized for English language. They fell short when they are used for locating web resources of other languages such as Amharic. This is mainly due to the specific features of the language that are not considered by those search engines. Amharic, which is a family of Semitic languages, is the official language of the federal government of Ethiopia. Currently, there are significant number of Amharic documents on the Web. In this study, an attempt is made to design and implement a search engine for Amharic language web documents. The research came up with a complete language specific search engine that has a crawler, an indexer, and a query engine component that are optimized for the language they are designed, Amharic language.