KZBlog

I’ve been playing with Kazakhstan’s search engine. It’s pretty clear that it covers mainly .kz domains, but also a few .ru sites. English language searches are therefore limited-but you can find sites in English. Overall it has a preference for formal resources. Searching for крем (cream) brings up resources about the Kremlin way before you get to anything about cosmetics. But there are interesting lapses. Searching for Astana brings up Wikipedia and business with Astana in the name before it gets to the Astana city official website, which is 7th on the list.

Interestingly it doesn’t distinguish between Kazakh and Russian so searching for сын (Russian for “son”) matches the Kazakh сынауға as well as Russian words. And while it does well recognizing word forms that contain the search term (i.e. сын will match сыночок, сына and сынақтан and Назарбаев will produce results for not only Назарбаев, but also Назарбаева), it doesn’t do well with word forms that are shorter or vary from the search term, so looking for дочери will match дочерью but not дочь. This seems like something that a Kazakh/Russian language search engine should be able to do since there are so many word roots.

It also seems to do better with general terms rather than specific terms. So searching for крем gives you better results than searching for крем для глаза (No results) and searching for a brand name like eyesential also gives you no results. (This started while looking for a specific brand of eye cream for my wife).

It’d be interesting to run a comparison with Google or Yandex in terms of usefulness of results, but I leave that to IT people, statisticians, and those with more free time than me.