Global, Non-English Search Engine

May 21, 2009 - PRLog -- Linguos (http://www.linguos.com) is a new search engine aimed at enabling and accelerating growth of the non-English web. It is aimed at the largest segment of internet users and the next 1 billion new internet users who use English as a second or third language. Most of these users have no convenient means to find content in their native languages.

Any user searching on the current crop of search engines for native content in cyrillic, indic, semitic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Greek and several eastern languages is currently required to have local keyboards or other keyboard mapping schemes to search fo text. These are usually standalone systems, independent of the search engines.  Many times users have to use multiple systems.  In the rare cases where transliteration is supported, users have to learn specific keyboard/character mappings.

Linguos takes a different approach to searching non-English content.  Users enter their searches in English, transcribing their terms phonetically. Linguos then transcribes users' terms into the user's target language, retrieving all typical phonetic variants and spellings in the target language.

There are no transliteration schemes to learn. Just enter queries as they 'sound'.  The only exception is Chinese, where Pinyin is used.

   http://www.linguos.com

Usage examples:

To search for the word "book" in your language:
If you pick
    Arabic, type kitaab.
    Korean, type chaek.
    Russian, type kniga.
    Tamil, type nool
The system will transcribe/transliterate appropriately to   ﻛِﺘَﺎﺐ   or   책   or   книга   or   நூல் and any of their variants, retrieving results for your selected language. Any of the transcribed variants can be excluded from searching by clicking on the red minus sign next to the search term on the results screen.

Linguos is currently in Beta and will add more features and functions as it progresses.

Complete list of languages:
Indic: Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu.
Semitic: Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, Kurdish (Sorani), Urdu.
Cyrillic: Russian, Abkhaz, Bulgarian, Kazakh, Serbian, Ukrainian.
CJK: Cantonese, Mandarin, Hiragana, Katakana, Korean.
Eastern: Myanmar (Burmese), Thai, Tibetan, Dzongkha (Bhutanese).
Other: Greek, Armenian, Georgian.

Some of the above scripts automatically incude multiple languages that use the same script.

Please check out the product at http://www.linguos.com and provide your feedback.

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Linguos is a search engine aimed at enabling access to the non-English web. Users search using English keyboards, transcribing search terms phonetically in English. Indic, Cyrillic, Semitc, CJK, Greek, Eastern and several other scripts are supported.