Hanoi Times - World famous search engines such as Google, Yahoo or MSN are very popular but don’t benefit Internet international users who need specific information about the things around them.

IZOMI (ease your mind) search engine was developed by a team led by Hoang Quoc Viet and Nguyen Huu Thanh and will provide domestic services to Vietnam’s fast growing internet base.

Viet said they came up with IZOMI accidentally. “I love coffee. Each time I discover an interesting café, I would invite my friends to come. But each time I had to wait hours because they had to get directions. That is when I thought of a service that provides my friends information about a café and its position o­n the city map just by typing in a key word or sending a message,” Viet said.

“When I studied IT in India, I learnt about search engines. After graduating, I worked for the IIT Institute in India and spent my time researching new search technologies, especially Google. I and Thanh had the same idea about designing a new-generation search engine based o­n web 2.0, named IZOMI,” Viet added.

After o­nly a year of research, IZOMI not o­nly provides information about cafés, it also enables Vietnamese Internet users to seek out local and international information fast and effectively.

It not o­nly helps users access information o­n the Internet but also “answers” questions through automatic chat tools like Yahoo Messenger or MSN. Even when users don’t have an Internet connection, they can still use this service through text messages o­n their cell phones.

Viet said IZOMI’s integration of a strong search engine with other functions, including full text search, information classification, etc is its unique strengths.