A while back on AltSearchEngines, we covered an Arabic search engine call Onkosh.  Today we’re pleased to update that report because Onkosh is now available as an Arabic/English search engine!


  There is the Arabic homepage…                                    and the English homepage.

I have asked Hany Abdelkawi of Onkosh to help explain their special features:

“Thank you very very much. I have just a couple of comments to differentiate between what is “Bel-3araby,” and the virtual keyboard. “Bel-3araby” is a patent pending feature. It is an Arabic name, and means “In Arabic.” It is a transliteration (not translation) feature. So how do you pronounce for example my name? Hany … using bel3araby this will show you the Arabic word equivalent .. (in this case “هاني”). Give it a try, and type an Arabic word, you may try simple words like ’salaam,’ or ‘allah’ and see the result showing in Arabic (and when you search, the Arabic word will be searched for). This also allows you to use alpha-numerical characters. The Arabic alphabet is 28 characters (written), and there are a few other characters that cannot be written — called diacritics (basically special form of the vowels). Since the Roman alphabet is only 26 characters, they caused the Arab users to adapt using special numerals to substitute the gab for the missing characters.. examples: ‘7′, ‘6′, ‘3′, ‘2′ and others.”

“Here, let me emphasize where our invention is. Basically we do not offer one-on-one mapping of characters, otherwise this wouldn’t deserve being a patent, and would typically give erroneous results. In Bel-3araby, there are lots of heuristic rules, and statistical models used beside integrating Arabic grammar for identifying the possible derivates of the Arabic words, in addition to what kind of the most-probable forms of Latin string/sequence of characters to represent a certain Arabic word. As a last step there might be, in certain situations, some check to ensure that the ‘proposed’ result would be an Arabic word — that is why when you type “Charles” for example, you would not get the Arabic word for it, since this is not an Arabic word.  (Sounds complex,  but when it comes to our guest column, I will try to simplify that.)”

“The second comment is about the keyboard. It is basically a virtual keyboard, because we discovered that it is necessary for miscellaneous reasons. Most people would master typing in English, and usually it is hard for them to type in Arabic. We thought it would be great to have the Arabic keyboard clear in a condensed size on the screen .. so typing an Arabic query is just a few clicks away. The second main reason, is that now can we internationalize Onkosh… We have lots of potential users living around the globe… they may be interested in our engine, yet typing would be such an ‘obstacle’ since they won’t have an Arabic keyboard on their physical machine - like you I guess!”

Summary

Onkosh is a search portal for the Arabic web. It searches for anything in Arabic on the world wide web, as well as anything Arabic-related in English or French on the web.

Onkosh understands the Arabic language and utilizes advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to ensure that you receive the best results for your search query.

The tabs relate to Web Search, Image Search, Blog Search, News Search, Forum Search, File Search and Directory.

Onkosh has a very exciting road-map ahead, so we have invited them to give us a full introduction once the dust settles on their new launch.  Feel free to check it out now, and we’ll hear more from them soon.

Congratulations on this milestone, Onkosh, and thanks for the explanation Hany!

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 4:40 pm and is filed under Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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