A personalized search engine developed by 16-year old Anmol Tukrel may one day rival the ones made by tech giants like Google. The Indian-origin Canadian citizen claims his invention delivers 47% more accurate results than Google’s and is around 21% more precise on average.
The project came about as his submission to the Google Science Fair, a competition for students aged 13 to 18 years. It took a few months to design and roughly 60 hours to code overall. The only tools Tukrel used were a computer with at least 1GB of free storage space, a spreadsheet program, a Python-language development setting and the New York Times.
He used the publication to compare his project’s search results with those of Google. After making up people with different interests but the same web history, Tukrel fed the data to both engines. He asserted that his algorithm looks at the content of the query, understands its meaning and further matches it to the user’s personality before giving an answer.
Tukrel runs his own company, Tacocat Computers, and is currently in India on an internship at an adtech firm called IceCream Labs. According to the Economic Times, he’s submitted a paper on his technology to the International High School Journal of Science and intends to develop a news aggregator based on it. He hopes to license it to digital marketing agencies in the future.
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While his search engine experiment is relatively low-scale, it does have the potential to become a compelling technology on a higher level. If you’re interested in checking out Anmol Tukrel’s research and results, he’s put it up online at this link.