World's poor to get own search engine

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States are developing a search engine designed for people - especially students - whose access to the internet is hampered by poor (slow) telephone connections. The Time Equals Knowledge (TEK) project involves building a low-connectivity search engine that is designed to enable speedy and inexpensive access to the internet.

Specifically, imagine that a student in Malawi seeks information about malaria on the web but is unable to access that information because the computer lab has only part-time dial-up access. In the evening, when the telephone line is available, the teacher e-mails this and other students' queries to a central server at MIT. The TEK programme searches the net, chooses the most suitable (relevant) webpages, compresses them, and e-mails the results the following day. The results are stored on the machine's internet cache. As the professor heading up the project at MIT puts it, "When the students arrive, they can browse through those pages the way they would if they had full internet connectivity". The programme keeps a record of all the information sent to avoid wasting bandwidth by re-sending the same webpages.

In the words of the article's author, "The thinking behind the TEK search engine is that people in poor countries are short of money but have time on their hands, whereas people in the West are cash-rich but time-poor."

The researchers aim to have a beta version of TEK ready to be tested in the next few months. Because the programme is too big to download over a slow and poor net connection, they are considering sending CDs to libraries so that people can borrow and install the software on their machines. They are also considering trying to persuade computer sellers in developing countries to install the programme on machines.

Click here for the full article on the BBC site (and to access internet and email links to the TEK project).