Multi-language search engine debuts

Wednesday March 26 1:12 PM PST

Multi-language search engine debuts

By Maria Seminerio

Integrated Intelligence Corp. is angling its I-Search search tool at companies with clients, customers or employees whose primary language is not English--a rapidly growing group, according to company President Carol Lin.

"I-Search works with foreign-language browsers to bring [online] content to wider audiences," Lin said.

The search engine lets users perform keyword searches for content in their native languages on any Web site or online database where it is installed. It simultaneously supports Asian double-byte character formats along with the single-byte ASCII characters that make up most Western languages, and provides searching capabilities in English, Spanish, French and several other European tongues, company officials said.

Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean are also supported, and other languages will be added in the coming months, company officials said. The I-Search interface supports Boolean operators and provides weighted and sorted search results, officials said.

IIC, which is headquartered in Marysville, Wash., and maintains offices in Chungquin, China, is positioning I-Search to work along with its service for mirroring Web sites and database information in a variety of languages from multiple servers worldwide, Lin said.

The mirrored sites and databases improve access in areas with very limited bandwidth, she said.

"Taiwan, for example, is very limited in the amount of U.S. connect time it can offer users," since only a single T-1 line links the island to the United States, Lin said.

I-Search runs on Intel Corp.-compatible Unix versions, Digital Equipment Corp.'s Alpha Unix and the Linux platform; Windows NT-compatible and Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Solaris versions are due later this year, company officials said. AIX and HP-UX versions are also scheduled to roll out this year.

Pricing starts at $5,000 per server installation. IIC can be reached at www.iicnet.com/.

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