Japanese Parties to Construct New Search Engine

Roughly 30 companies and organizations in Japan are banding together to develop and launch new search engine technology, meant to help Japanese companies compete with the search market’s big three, Google, Yahoo and MSN, the MSN-Mainichi Daily News reports.

Among the companies and entities involved are Hitachi, Fujitsu, the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone group, and the University of Tokyo, according to MSN-Mainichi.

The Japanese government is to provide a portion of the necessary funding, and the parties hope to open an R&D center as early as this Friday, with the target launch date of the actual search engine set for within two years, MSN-Mainichi reports.

Google, Yahoo and MSN all keep their search engine technologies secret, but the group in Japan plans on opening up its technology to Asian companies and users, as well as those in foreign countries, MSN-Mainichi reports. Users will also be able to tweak the technology to tailor search engines to their own businesses or interests, according to MSN-Mainichi.

Those involved also hope to develop a system to enable users to receive search results in response to voice queries, MSN-Mainichi reports.

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