Skip to main content

A Mobile Based Search Engine to Deliver Information on Any Topic


INFORMATION SERVICES The SMSGyan algorithm enables users to get information on any topic through a simple SMS from their cell phones.
Deepak Ravindran calls it the "instant cup of knowledge". His mobile based service, SMSGyan, promises information on almost any topic to the user on his mobile phone without asking him to click on any link. There are a host of services existing which would give users infor­mation on certain topics on their mobile phones but most of these are either lim­ited to a sector, such as railway enquiry, or they send links to the user's mobile phone asking the user to click on them to access desired information. Such ser­vices have not become very popular with the vast majority of the people because they don't have GPRS connection on their mobile phones or the connection is weak. Though India has almost 700 million users today, the smart phone pen­etration still remains very low.
Gyan means "knowledge" in Hindi, and the SMSGyan provides myriad infor­mation services which include dictionary, encyclopaedia, job search, health, stock market, and more via text messages. The idea was seeded when one day, Hisam, one of the founders of Innoz Technolo­gies, was in transit and wanted to know the meaning of a word and found that his basic phone was of no use to get the information. Since the phone had no application and no Internet connection to go to a dictionary and enquire, Hisam had to do without knowing the mean­ing. "This kind of a thing has happened to each one of us and it can be frustrating," says Ravindran. The team then sat down to put together an answer engine which would give users answers to various kinds of queries from anywhere at any time.

The SMSGyan platform can work with any number of databases or resources. It delivers mobile-optimized results. These text results support upto a maximum 500 characters of information across all operators in India. A user would have to type an SMS with the keyword GYAN fol­lowed by the query and send it to 56161. For example, to know the stock price of Infosys, a user would have to type "GYAN Stock Infosys" and send it to the speci­fied number.

Once the Gyan engine gets a query from a mobile user, the algorithm spi­ders the World Wide Web or Wikis on the Web for the related information, zeroes in on the most relevant inputs, and then shortens it to be sent to a mobile phone via the text message route. The categories that are currently available are encyclo­pedia, dictionary, acronym, live cricket scores, movie reviews, book reviews, weather alerts, stock market, gadgets prices, and calorie meter. Other recent additions to premium services include localized searches, job search, and even a health service over the phone. For these services, the platform makes use of its content partners to deliver the required information. In some cases, pictures are also sent as results to support the text results to a user's mobile device in answer to his or her query.

Having added services for Facebook, Twitter, and email via SMS over the SMSGyan platform, Ravindran now has plans of making information in local lan­guages available for the benefit of the rural masses. Future tweaks to the service would also include translators and video or voice based on-demand results. RC Dutt of Technopark, Trivandrum, where Ravindran's company is incubated and is being mentored, says "Deepak's product is a paradigm shift from standard mobile service offerings as it adopts a user cen­tric learning approach using a low cost, low bandwidth medium as its delivery mechanism."

SMSGyan was launched in January 2009, and it currently caters to five mil­lion users, answering almost 20,000 que­ries daily.

Said By: Technology Review
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Characteristics of a Good Programming Language

Till now there are many high level languages which are very popular, and there are others, which could not become so popular in-spite of being very powerful. There might be many reasons for the success of a language, but one obvious reason is the characteristics of the language. Several characteristics believed to be important with respect to making a programming language good are briefly discussed below. Simplicity A good programming language must be simple and easy to learn and use. For example, BASIC is liked by many programmers only because of its simplicity. Thus, a good programming language should provide a programmer with a clear, simple and unified set of concepts which can be easily grasped. It is also easy to develop and implement a compiler or an interpreter for a programming language that is simple. However, the power needed for the language should not be sacrificed for simplicity. The overall simplicity of a programming language strongly affects the readability of the pr...
1 comment
Read more

Angular 4 and Firebase Authentication: Setup

If you have come to this article, it means you are keen to learn new technology and that too Firebase. I love Firebase because it provides all basic but important features of any web application. Take for example, authentication, which is cumbersome and risky if not implemented with utmost care. And when we have the integration of Angular and Firebase, it becomes a lot easier for a developer to build such crucial modules in less time with minimal efforts. In this article we will create a simple Angular application using Firebase. I am going ahead with the understanding that you know the benefits of Firebase and have little knowledge about it. There are plenty of posts out on the web if you are behind. Step 1: Install Angular CLI (if not installed). npm install -g angular-cli Step 2: Create new Angular 4 project. By default now angular CLI will create Angular 4 project so you need not fret. ng new firebase-authentication Step 3: Check whether the ne...
Post a Comment
Read more

Switch-case, simple calculator . . .

11.      Write a program to perform some mathematic functions with the help of “switch-case” statement. #include<stdio.h> #include<conio.h> void main() { int a,b,ans; char c; clrscr(); printf("\ Enter a and b:"); scanf("%d%d",&a,&b); printf("\n Enter operator:"); fflush(stdin); scanf("%c",&c); switch(c) { case'+':ans=a+b;       break; case'-':ans=a-b;       break; case'*':ans=a*b;       break; case'/':ans=a/b;       break; } printf("\n ans %d",ans); getch(); } 12.      Print the Fibonacci series #include<stdio.h> #include<conio.h> void main() { int a=1,b=1,s=3,c,ch; clrscr(); printf("how many steps="); scanf("%d",&ch); printf("%5d%5d",a,b); for(s=3;s<=ch;s++) {       c=a+b;       printf("%5d",c);       a=b;    ...
3 comments
Read more