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• Useful or Superfluous?: New Armenian search engine set up to tackle “online assimilation”

2 AK Not really, you can choose between arm. eng. & rus. all of them work fine with me. ...

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Authors of a new Armenian internet search engine believe their effort will become a useful tool bridging worldwide Armenian communities due to features typical only of their system. But skeptics say the project brings little benefit as most Armenian-language searches are already available through established global search engines.

A creative group called “Hanguyc” on Tuesday made a presentation of the product that took them more than three years to make – a “Hanguyc Search” web search system (http://www.hsearch.am).

The presentation was marked by the signing of a memorandum between the group and the Ministry of Diaspora about the implementation of joint projects.

Diaspora Minister Hranush Hakobyan, who attended the presentation and discussion, welcomed the initiative.

“This is the area where we will still have much to do no matter how much we try to do,” she said. “The most important thing is that we are able to unite our worldwide Diaspora Armenian communities. For the first time we try to realize such an Armenian-language project. The Armenian language should be an important part of the computer network.”

“Hanguyc” group head Mher Abrahamyan says an internet searchable in Armenian is part of the solution to the problems raised by the Diaspora minister.

“For centuries we have faced the problem of surviving and preserving our identity. At present, the internet is developing simultaneously with the development of information technologies, and we find it difficult to resist ‘online assimilation’. Now a large number of Armenians type Armenian words using Latin letters,” said Abrahamyan.

“We have divided our project of cooperation with the Ministry into several stages by which we will try to solve several problems, but all solutions will be aimed at preserving national identity,” he added.

The group said some features of the system absent even in many well-known search engines such as Google, Yandex, Yahoo and others will guarantee the success of the project.

Chief programmer of the system Artyom Chakhoyan lists a few of them: “We have a more precise and specialized supply of information in Armenian; a comprehensive basis of more than 5,000 Armenian sites as of today; unification of Armenian font-faces and encodings, which enables a search with any Armenian fonts.”

“This will result in an increase in the number of Armenian-letter searches, due to which the number of searches typed in Latin letters that currently make 60 percent of searches [by users for whom Armenian is a native language] will decrease,” added Chakhoyan.

Yet, not all of those in the know are optimistic about the ultimate success of the new search engine.

Programmer Rafael Harutyunyan doubts the search engine will manage to attract a large number of users.

“Of course, the authors have done a huge amount of work, but they were not prepared for the presentation and made a rather poor presentation of their work. I think people will simply not use it,” said the programmer, who also attended the Tuesday discussion.

Besides, according to Harutyunyan, other, much better search engines, such as Google or Yandex, offer an opportunity of quite a good search on Armenian websites.

“And websites with encoded fonts – the solution to which problem Hanguyts authors consider to be an important feature of their system – are quite rare, and I think Google and other search engines fully satisfy the demands that Armenian users currently have,” he said.