Mantis Turkish Search Engine Project

Developments in late years about search engines pointed out that search engines are not only simple portals that provide information necessities of users but also critical software which control enormous information on internet. It's biggest proof is the expansion in attention to this matter from business level to the country level. We think that countries or firms who's sharing the “information is the power” thought will labor to control this enormous information on internet.

In Turkey use of internet have risen quickly, choices of users have also displayed a change in parallel to improvements at world in time. The initial spreading of internet in Turkey had been started in chatting and entertainment medium. However in time internet in Turkey started to be the gate for accessing information. In this scope researches pointed out that %65 of Turkish internet users prefer to use internet to search for information. It had also been seen that a crushing majority like %90 of users prefer Google as search engine.

Google’s crushing altitude in Turkey is no doubt the cause of it's extremely simple interface, satisfying query results and it's perfect marketing strategy. Apart from these, another strong case is the great lack of efficiency in local search engines. In fact using local search engine rates in China and in Latin World is just the opposite. So, rates of using local search engines can be as high as %65.

Common problem of search engines can make to search as Turkish is that prefer methods have easier implementation and low cost instead of methods have been proved their efficiency by academicians and researches. However a lot of academical labours proved the increasing success by performing these methods for Turkish collections. For the rest, search engines try to construct from the rough with very little budget and at last neither base attack nor a possible machine comes out.

In labours on search engines make indexing for Turkish, even if popular engines that are preferred by users, have been back concerning accessing ideal search engine criterion yet, especially it is thought of that for Turkish documents new steps will become with more effective search methods and intensive care of users will be attracted on a new search engines.

Our firm makes a decision to develop a search engine that will be able to search on only Turkish pages for the purpose of inhibition of crushing by a majority of users’ orientations to only one search engine on the web in our country. In this scope, earlier popular Turkish search engine problems are examined and an extended search engine architect that contains methods that will be able to remove this problems have recommended. Our firm that is based Research and Development purpose to carry out a search engine that will be able to produce effective solutions for problems mentioned above, indexes Turkish pages on the web and provides to effective search on this index by using open source code solutions.


When our “Mantis Search Engine” project -which we call shortly as MANTAM is concluded successfully, being thought of using of leader search engine, we aim to present users a more effective search engine for Turkish content.

MANTAM is funded by Tübitak's SME Research and Development Program.