Dejan Ilic, the author of the Durbin portal, presented the first Serbian internet search engine that is primarily focused on the preservation and promotion of Cyrillic in the digital world. Durbin currently indexes over 165,000 websites on domestic domains, allowing users to search for content in both scripts, while the results and the user interface are displayed exclusively in Cyrillic.
“The starting point was, above all, the preservation of Cyrillic, and since I am an electrical engineer by profession and work in information technologies, that topic is extremely close to me, so I decided to try to make a Cyrillic search engine and an internet search engine that is for all websites in the Serbian language,” says Dejan Ilic, the creator of the Durbin search engine.
Currently, over 165,000 websites on .rs and .srb domains are indexed on Durbin, which is approximately 1.3 million pages belonging to those websites.
“And the search results do not depend on whether you typed in Cyrillic or Latin, because Durbin treats both scripts equally; the search results depend only on the value of the website’s content in relation to the search text,” Ilic states.
“Also, the results are displayed in Cyrillic as an additional way of encouraging the use of Cyrillic.
And the interface itself, meaning that basic form where the search is entered and other pages, are written in Cyrillic,” Ilic emphasizes.
He also warns that the onslaught of Latin is great, meaning that Latin is used much more.
“As far as technology is concerned, right now it is working in our favor for Cyrillic to be used because, despite the popular belief, the script is extremely suitable for internet search. It is even better than Latin by several parameters; Cyrillic is unambiguous, meaning one sound one letter, we do not have, for example, combinations of two characters to have a sound,” explains the creator of the Cyrillic search engine.
As for statistics, currently ten percent of websites on the Serbian internet use Cyrillic predominantly.
“Unlike the nineties and two-thousandths, now through the standard, all scripts of this world are equalized with Latin and there is no technological need for Cyrillic not to be used,” points out Ilic.
Thanks to the fact that Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic conceived and conceptualized the script according to the phonetic principle – meaning one sound, one letter – he thereby, perhaps without even suspecting at that time, which was the nineteenth century, made a script that is very suitable for internet search.
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Source: RTS, Photo: Prinstscreen durbin.rs