Don’t worry, however, as searching for and utilising digital documents will soon no longer be a drama, thanks to a new locally developed search engine that will enable you to quickly find information at all times.

Local company ThaiQuest has turned its huge data management experience into the research and development of its own search engine called ThaiQuest Search, to support digital searching in both English and Thai.

The company’s expertise has derived from 10 years’ experience as an online news service under the NewsCentre brand, managing 15 million digital news documents supplied by more than 200 news sources worldwide.

Pongsaya Hongswadhi, managing director of ThaiQuest, said the beauty of ThaiQuest Search was that it allows users to do real-time full-text searches without needing to pre-assign a key word. It also supports searching across seven file formats – Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Adobe PDF, HTML, plain text, and web archive (MHT) – supporting 200 to 300 sub-file formats.

“It is easy to use. Just put a digital document into the archive and without a pre-assigned key word you can immediately search for that document with a search time of less than one second,” said Pongsaya.

He said that with other search engines the same search meant the search engine requires three hours, 10 hours, or even one day after data input. “That is not a real-time search,” he added.

Pongsaya believes that the search engine is a key factor in a digital society. People need not only a broadband network and huge storage, but also search engines to find the right documents in time, whenever they are browsing through their computers.

After offering ThaiQuest Search for internal use by NewCentre users for two years, the company has decided to bring this software into commercial use.

“We have provided this software to four customers – KIMENG, the Customs Department, Marketeer, and Settrade.com – since the middle of last year. Next year we will concentrate on marketing the search engine to target customers – organisations who have over 10,000 digital documents,” said Pongsaya.

At a trial of ThaiQuest Search at NewsCentre, it found the right document from 15 million digital documents within one second. “We spent a fair bit of time and money to develop this search engine software. The target is to break even within five years,” said Pongsaya.

Sarana Tasanasant, the company’s business development executive, said ThaiQuest Search had been developed as an open-standard Web service based on an application programming interface to allow customers’ and partners’ software engineers to develop their applications on top of the core engine.

“Developers can make added-on applications to plug in to the core search engine by using languages such as VB.NET, ASP.NET, C#, C++, Delphi, Java, and JSP. It is ready for further development. With our 50 software engineers and Thai language expertise we spent two years on research and development of this software,” said Sarana.

To encourage the wide adoption of the search engine, the company also developed a desktop version to allow PC users to search for documents in their computer. This offers the experience of an efficient new search engine for computer users, instead of using Microsoft searches that can seek only file names and do not support the Thai language.

Sarana said the ThaiQuest Search desktop version would have a smaller search capability but the same search functionality as ThaiQuest Search, as well as having the ability to do video-clip and photo searches. A desktop version should be released by the middle of next year for free download via the company’s and partner’s websites.

ThaiQuest has Bt20 million in registered capital, and has benefited from tax incentives from the Board of Investment since last year.

asina@nationgroup.com

Asina Pornwasin

The Nation