16-year Anmol Tukrel, an Indian-origin Canadian citizen has designed a personalised search engine that claims to be as high as 47 percent more accurate than Google, and about 21 percent more accurate on an average. Tukrel’s search engine was designed as a part of a project to submit to the Google Science Fair, which is a global online competition open to students aged 13 to 18 years.
Anmol Tukrel, who has just completed his tenth grade stated that he took a few months to design this project and approximately 60 hours to code the engine. In conversation with The Times of India, he said, “I thought I would do something in the personalized search space. It was the most genius thing ever. But when I realised Google already does it, I tried taking it to the next level.”
His development kit included only a computer with at least 1GB of free storage space, a python-language development environment, a spreadsheet program and access to Google and New York Times. The report points out that to test the accuracy of his search engine, Tukrel limited the search query to this year’s articles from the New York Times.
He claims that his search engine is better than Google because not only does it take into account location or browsing history, but also tries to understand context and meaning. According to the report, Tukrel was in India for a two-week internship programme at Bengaluru-based adtech firm IceCream Labs.
