Peruvian student creates web search engine in 109 languages

Peruvian student Héctor Díaz has developed the Konlap web search engine.

The software system for web searches provides information in one hundred and nine languages, including Quechua and Aymara, the native languages of fifteen percent of Peruvians.

For his creation, he received an award from Microsoft, announced the National Program of Scholarships and Educational Credits Programa Nacional de Becas y Crédito Educativo (Pronabec) on Monday (12).

According to Díaz (19), from the Amazonas region, “due to a lack of incentives, people do not learn English, which affects education in the long term,” since more than sixty percent of the information on the Internet is in English and about three percent is in Spanish.

“Search engines are an important tool for accessing information not only in English but also in other languages,” Díaz affirmed in a press release by Pronabec.

The university student, who received a scholarship from the Peruvian government, taught himself languages and programming.

Late last year, he began working on the prototype of the Konlap, named after the fortress of Kuelap, located on a mountain in the Amazon.

After its founding, Konlap received funding from Emergent Ventures, a grant program for entrepreneurs from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in the United States.

The website also received one hundred and fifty thousand U.S. dollars from Microsoft For Startups to appear in thirty-five million Internet searches, which, according to its inventor, “is a sufficient amount to validate the product in the foreign market.”

Díaz stressed that his initiative aims to universalize access to information, and that is why he started with the languages spoken in Peru, after Spanish.

“We want to start with Peru, with people who speak Quechua or Aymara, our people who have almost no information in their languages.

Then we want to help other people; we will expand significantly in East and Southeast Asia, where there are huge populations that still have very little Internet content,” said the young entrepreneur.