The Manthan Award is organized annually to scout and recognized some of the best practices in the field of e-Content based innovations. Launched in 2004, the award is organized by New Delhi based Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF), in partnership with the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS).
The Manthan Award for India’s successful e-Content for Development 2007 was conferred on ‘raftaar.com ’ in the e-Localisation category. Rataar is an integrated Hindi search engine on the web, created by Delhi based Indicus Netlabs Pvt. Ltd. Its USP is its unique typing interface. The award ceremony was held on September 22, 2007 at IICC, New Delhi and is given annually to promote usage of ICT at the grassroots level for ICT enabled e-Content innovations and ultimately e-Content development in the country.
Whenever a medium has broadened its base and gone rural, the demand for local language has increased manifold as we have witnessed with the case of print, TV, and radio, says Peeyush Bajpai, director and Co-founder of Raftaar.com. “As net penetration reaches the smaller towns, blocks and big villages, the requirement would be for local language content. This has happened in case of print, television, radio and I do not see any reason why it should not happen for the Internet,” he adds. Raftaar.com is not yet a Google but as Internet finds more & more users in rural areas, the utility for a search engine is most likely to increase.
The project description : www.Raftaar.com is world's first integrated search engine in Hindi. It allows users to query in Hindi and search across all Hindi sites. A simple user interface is designed to enable typing in Hindi by a wide spectrum of people comprising at one end who recognize the English alphabets on the keyboard and can relate to the sounds associated with them and at the other end are those who have no idea about English and thus can use on screen keyboard to type in Hindi.
Raftaar's search algorithm ensures that one gets the most relevant results, which are categorized to enable easier search experience. To help the user further, the spell check and related word option help to refine the search with ease. The cache results ensure that one can see any site in a standard Unicode font. The Raftaar index presently has the largest set of searchable Hindi pages.
It has the largest set of indexed Hindi web Pages-standardized pages from all the sites so that you do not need to download new fonts. Besides, it has the capability to convert all the fonts available. The other features include the first integrated online spell checker in Hindi, the first integrated online Hindi thesaurus, on the hour crawling of latest news, tracking of Hindi blogs and first Hindi search bar that can easily be integrated with any site. It can also be scaled to work for all Brahmi based scripts.
The Manthan Award is organized annually to scout and recognized some of the best practices in the field of e-Content based innovations. Launched in 2004, the award is organized by New Delhi based Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF), in partnership with the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS). The winners of the awards are selected based on their contributions to bridge the digital divide and address the issues of grassroots-level empowerment and development. DEF has volunteered to play its part in organizing Manthan Award annually to bring out open best ICT and e-Content practices across India, by recognizing and felicitating the innovations and take them to a higher level of excellence. The winners of Manthan Award are selected to compete for World Summit Award under the auspices of the UN ICT system.
