Medianama : "Wikimedia India Rolls Out Realtime Search; Supports Indic Editions"

http://www.medianama.com/2012/03/223-wikimedia-india-rolls-out-realtime-search-supports-indic-editions/


It looks like Wikimedia India has implemented a project by engineering student Shrey Gokani to roll out an instant search engine of its own at live.wikimedia.in. The site is under a creative commons license, with the code dual licensed under GPL and Creative Commons. The Wikimedia Instant site does appear to have additional functionality over Gokani’s version, with the ability to choose an Indic Input keyboard, since the service supports Indic language editions of Wikimedia services.

The search engine works quite similar to Wikilive, another student project about which, we had written in November 2011. And similar to what we had wished, Wikimedia Live also covers Wikipedia, Wikitionary, Wikibooks, Wikiquotes, Wikiversity, Wikinews and Wikisource, and their Indic editions, in realtime. The site also offers other relevant Wikipedia search results on the top, followed by a preview of the most relevant Wikipedia article to the search query.

 
Indic Language Support: The site allows users to type in queries in 21 Indic languages including Kannada, Hindi, Telugu, Marathi, Sanskrit, Bangla and others. How it works is that the search engine allows the user to choose the language of his preference, following which he has to choose an input script which is apt for his language. For instance, if one chooses Kannada as his preferred language, he has to choose between the Kannada transliteration option or choose the Kannada Inscript option, however if you choose Hindi as your preferred language, you will have to select the sole Hindi Inscript option.

Irrelevant Results? We weren’t too happy with results generated through Indic language transliteration input, since it delivered wrong results in most cases when we gave it a spin (we tried it on OS X Lion on Google Chrome). We hope that Wikimedia works on delivering better transliteration support or improving the results for Indic languages. However, we got accurate results with the Hindi Inscript input option.

Similar Portals: Deepanshu Mehndiratta, a second year engineering student at BITS-Pilani KK Birla Goa Campus, had created an instant Wikipedia search called ‘Wikilive‘ which allowed users to type in a search query and get relevant Wikipedia article and topics instantly. WikiInstant and The Instant Wiki are other portals which allow users to search Wikipedia in realtime.



Regards
Tinu Cherian
press@wikimedia.in
http://wiki.wikimedia.in/In_the_news

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