Government of India has launched Sandhan, a search engine for tourism related queries in five Indian Languages including Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Telugu and Tamil. According to the site, the search engine was developed by 120 researchers of 12 institutions over a period of 6 years and was led by Pushpak Bhattacharya under the supervision of Technology Development for Indian Languages at DEITY. Sandhan is a mission mode project of a consortium of academic and research institutions, and industry partners lead by IIT Bombay. Features: The search engine lets users submit their query with the help of an in-script keyboard or allows users to submit query phonetically (transliteration). It offers an additional URL based semantic search facility for Tamil language. What's interesting is that the search engine displays results in the same language as that of the query submitted, and the pages that it lists are also in the same language. The search engine also has an auto suggest feature where the search engine provides the user with suggestions upon entering the query. This feature was made widely popular by search engine giant, Google. On the search result page, Sandhan provides a summary of the search result page upon hovering on the result. Our take: We tried the search engine by submitting various tourism related queries and we felt that the site did not return satisfactory results. For example, upon submitting a query on Darjeeling Hotels, the first ten results displayed by the search engine were blogs and Wikipedia entries and did not display relevant information what…
