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This original search engine for the inuktitut language allows for the retrieval of inuktitut text from inuktitut web pages, whatever the font and the character set used to display the syllabic characters in those pages. Moreover, for the user's convenience, the text to be searched for can be input in the most common syllabic fonts Nunacom, Prosyl and AiPaiNunavik, in Unicode syllabics, and also in the roman alphabet. Wildcards are also allowed, as well as the boolean operators AND, OR and NOT.
For more information about how to use the search engine, please visit this page.
To access the NRC Inuktitut Search Engine, please go to this address.
for example,
you will get nothing.
(vi);
in the "english" fonts, it represents the alphabetic roman character
'F'. This means that an inuktitut word like 
(ilinniarvik - school) in Nunacom is
in fact indexed by the common search engines as its
"english"-code-equivalent wo8ix3F4.
Each
so-called 'legacy' font has its own code-to-glyph association table,
and although there may be similitudes between some fonts, there are
also big differences. A number of inuktitut words do have
the same code sequence in different fonts, but most words have
different code sequences. For example, a word like is w6]vNw]/E/z5
in
Nunacom, w6>vNw>/E/z5
in Prosyl, w6√Nw÷E/z5
in Naamajut, Žñ›¶ŽÎäÍö”
in Aujaq2, w6Ïâ÷E/z5
in AiPaiNunavik,
... In order to search for that word with the existing search
engines, one would have to search for all those code sequences and more
- given
that one knows of them in the first place.
in the example above have
code sequences that can be
indexed by the common search engines, it is not the case of a great
number of
inuktitut words the code sequences of which contain codes that are not
considered by those search engines as valid word
characters but as word delimiters. Consequently, such inuktitut words are
not indexed, and therefore cannot be
retrieved with those search engines. Moreover, since
some codes are considered as delimiters, a code sequence containing
those delimiter codes will be interpreted not as one single word but
as a set of words. For example, a search with Google at
www.google.ca for the Nunacom inuktitut word , with its code sequence
'w6]vNw]/E/z5', returns 18300 hits;
at www.google.com, Google returns 7470 hits. Because ']' and '/' are delimiters to
Google, the pages returned are those all the "parts" w6, vNw, E, z5, and
their upper-/lower-case equivalents, like
the following:
... MFO@W&+VNW>B^5N.82PSE5M(G(.#XO?'JVS+S`^0++,#/EIULP1
... R&JGR^OH+_L*0@<";+M4>!$
MLWJ8_.0MK^8.6,S8''W6=8M*I22580
... R!\>="4'+=8O5,!I5[(H\ZC"]^I1KH8*/G
M&N+E]Z5[?,6XEE4< ...
For the same word, the NRC Inuktitut Search Engine returns 1 hit !!!
The current search engines were developed bearing in mind
languages (primarely English), that use an
alphabet
with upper and lower cases where the case does not convey any meaning
at the lexeme level. For example, 'sky', 'SKY', 'Sky' are all the same
word.The search is done with no regards
to the case. Searching for any of those forms will result in pages containing any of those forms, independently of the case. So, an input like the Nunacom word which has the indexable code sequence
wo8ix3F4 will
return pages that contain not only that sequence, but also WO8IX3F4, Wo8iX3f4,
and all the code sequences with the 'letter' codes in the lower case
and in the upper case, that is, 32 different sequences. The problem is that although those
sequences may correspond to the same word in languages with cases, they
do not in Inuktitut with legacy fonts. In our
example, WO8IX3F4
in Nunacom represents the Inuktitut word 
, and Wo8iX3f4, the word 
, that have nothing to do with the
input query; they are not even Inuktitut words.