IITB developing search engine

Hewlett Packard (HP) Labs and IIT Bombay are working together on developing a search engine which can provide relevant information on the searched queries, within a short period of time, reports The Business Standard. The Computer Science Department of the IIT-B is among the few institutes around the world to receive grants which the HP Labs had initiated last year.

The team along with Professor Soumen Chakrabarti at IIT-B used this grant to work on a new search engine which will take measures to crawl the web to provide relevant answers to queries.

The team has already created billions of annotation links between a 500 million web page corpus and millions of entities known to Wikipedia. The data is being made on 42 high-end HP servers with over 350 gigabytes of RAM and over 150 terabytes of disks, which are donated by Yahoo. HP Labs and Microsoft Research have provided additional research funding.

The initial results have shown exciting results, as Sayali Kulkarni, a student working on the project says, "The search for quantity queries get answered in 2-5 seconds." The search engine will even allow searching for entities like "how old is Feng Shui?", and the number of AIDS affected people in the world, adds Prof Chakrabarti.

The search engine is designed to understand more queries and respond with information nuggets and tables, not just the links of the pages, making it different from the other search engines.

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