2014.06.15缅甸的搜索引擎推出七月.docxVIP

Myanmar search engine to launch in JulyBy?Whitney Light ??|???Sunday, 15 June 2014/index.php/business/technology/10709-myanmar-search-engine-to-launch-in-july.html11As online and mobile technology takes off, how will people search Myanmar-language content? The answer is uncertain: The country has one of the lowest internet penetration rates in the world and, so far, no very good search tools. That’s why Bindez, a local start-up, is working on it.Nurtured through Project Hub’s 2013 fellowship for entrepreneurs, the project belongs to computer science grads Ko Htet Will, 23, and Ko Ye Wint Ko, 24, who co-founded Bindez with their fellowship mentor and now CEO, Rahul Batra, 29. With a recently confirmed seed investment and a uniquely qualified team, the project is one to watch as the country makes the leap from virtually no tech to the future.“We’re trying to imagine what a search looks like if you block out the picture of having Google and Yahoo. What else could it be? Would it be just a blank page, or would it have a more intuitive approach?” Mr. Batra said, sitting at a table covered with laptops, wires and tins of snacks in Bindez’s current home office inKyeemyindaing.Google launched its Myanmar site in March 2013 and tech watchers expect it will invest more resources here, too. Bindez said it hopes to offer users something different from the search giant. “We want to redefine the way Myanmar people consume information to progress in their daily lives,” Ko Ye Wint Ko said.Any research team faces a difficult challenge. “When you launch a search engine, you have to have crawled everything in Burmese on the net and it’s spread a lot of places … so you need a lot of time and resources spend culling the data,” said Ravi Chhabra, an adviser to the Myanmar Computer Federation. That’s partly why few have invested in similar projects so far, he said.Building search tools also requires work on Myanmar natural language processing (NLP) – the field of computer science concerne