Date:08/08/2003 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2003/08/08/stories/2003080802021300.htm

National

Don't search, do a `thedal'

By Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore Aug. 7 . The ongoing research work of an M.Tech student — L. Bala Sundara Raman — at the Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) holds out the possibility that one can use Indian language search terms to find Indian language documents, something that has been rather difficult to do with the current crop of search engines. The search interface called "Thedal" (search in Tamil) helps the user to find the vast amount of information available in Tamil font documents even if one makes the search in English characters. It transliterates the query into a Tamil font (Mylai) representation and then sends both the original as well as the transliterated query to the Google search facility. In future enhancements Mr. Sundara Raman hopes to provide parsing of the snippets for each match, extracting the Tamil text and displaying it in Text boxes in Tamil font. He wrote the programme for the `Thedal' using Microsoft's Net technology and SQL Server.