Search Engine for Amharic Language Web Documents

The World Wide Web, a major information publishing and retrieving mechanism, is one of many applications that run over the Internet. The Web is a huge repository of information in the form text, image, audio, and video. Search engines, such as Google, Yahoo!, etc, are the first port of call for the discovery of 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 resources of interest of other languages on the Web. 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 is significant number of Amharic documents on the Web. These documents need a search tool that considers the typical characteristics of the language. This book tries to design and implement a complete language specific search engine for Amharic web documents. It explores different topics pertinent to the area of language specific search engines.