Government on Thursday launched a search engine that will help people to search tourism related information on the internet in five different Indian languages.

The search engine, Sandhan, was launched by Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY) Secretary J Satyanarayana in New Delhi.
"This will fill the wide gap that exists in fulfilling the information needs of Indians not conversant with English-estimated at 90 per cent of the population," an official statement said.

Sandhan will be available in Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu.

You can submit a query either with the help of in-script keyboard or phonetic keyboard and in case of in-script keyboard, user can type using the keyboard or onscreen keyboard, the statement said.

According to the statement, the search engine has been developed by 120 researchers of 12 institutions over a period of 6 years. It was led by Pushpak Bhattacharya under the supervision of Technology Development for Indian Languages at DEITY.

"It has the capability to process the query based on its language and retrieves results only from that language," the statement added.

The search engine Sandhan is a mission mode project of a group of academic and research institutions, and industry partners lead by IIT Bombay.
 

The members of the consortium include CDAC Noida, IIT Kharagpur, Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Anna University, CDAC Pune, Indian Institute of Information Technology among others, the statement said.

The search engine can display ten results at one time foe enhanced readability, it added.