23/06-09   -   Press releases

Setooz.com : Swedish Sökmotor, Finnish Hakukone and Norwegian Søkemotor

Hyderabad, INDIA (PRWEB) Friday 19th, June, 2009 – SETU Software Systems P. Ltd., a startup company incubated at IIIT in Hyderabad, India, is preparing to launch a new local language search engine called ‘Setooz’ (pronounced as say-thuuz). Setooz can search Indian language documents along with many other world languages. In a pilot launch, the search engine is going to support 23 world languages, most of which are European languages, including the Swedish Sökmotor, Finnish Hakukone and Norwegian Søkemotor. A few Asian languages such as Arabic, Persian and Urdu are also in the pipeline. The company chose these languages as an initial set of pilot languages, and plans to provide Indian language search as a service through popular Indian portals.

According to the founders of the company, Setooz is designed to automatically learn the nuances of a language based on the way users search on the website. The search engine can then use such learnings to perform a wide variety of tasks, such as recognizing a language text to understanding the morphology of the language. This, they say, directly improves the quality of the search in a local language.

Talking about the need for such a new search engine, Prasad, the founder CEO of the company said, “Most of today’s popular search engines view search as an information overload problem. Whereas, most of the local languages face information under-load problem. Hence local language searching without language intelligence just does not work well. We are trying to improve search engines with some language intelligence. ".

On the future plans for the search engine, the founders said that they are working on some very interesting problems that come up in non-English languages. However, they feel the initial version of Setooz is a step in the right direction and provides a platform for further research.
When asked about the existing search engines and how Setooz fares against them, Prasad said, “With enormous amount and the variety of information on the web, the search engines complement each other, each bringing in some uniqueness and focus. At the end of the day, all this will benefit the user and bring in newer markets and user-base."


About the company:
SETU Software Systems Pvt. Ltd., is a start-up company based in Hyderabad, India. The company was incubated in IIIT’s incubation center. SETU was founded by Prasad Pingali, a Ph.D student and Vasudeva Varma, an Associate Professor at IIIT. Before starting the company, Prasad and Vasu worked on a research project called ‘WebKhoj’ to address some of the issues facing Indian language web search. This study motivated them to pursue the search engine issues facing other non-English languages.
SETU, which means a bridge in Sanskrit, was founded to bridge information access barriers due to human language complexity. SETU was also coined as an acronym for ‘Search and Extraction Technologies Unlimited’. Setooz, the web search engine built at SETU, is an English plural of the word SETU and means bridges.
The test version of the search engine can be accessed at http://www.setooz.com .