“Durbin”, first Serbian internet search engine dedicated to preserving Cyrillic script

Dejan Ilic, the author of the Durbin portal, presented the first Serbian internet search engine that is primarily focused on preserving and promoting the Cyrillic script in the digital world. Durbin currently indexes over 165,000 sites on domestic domains, allowing users to search for content in both scripts, while the results and user interface are displayed exclusively in Cyrillic.

– The starting point was primarily the preservation of the Cyrillic script, and since I am an electrical engineer by profession and work in information technology, this topic is extremely close to me, and then I decided to try to create a Cyrillic search engine and an internet search engine that is for all sites in the Serbian language – says Dejan Ilic, the creator of the Durbin search engine.

Currently, over 165,000 sites on the .rs and .srb domains have been indexed at Durbin, and that is approximately 1.3 million pages belonging to these sites.

– And the search results do not depend on whether you typed in Cyrillic or Latin, because Durbin treats both scripts equally, and the search results depend only on the value of the site’s content in relation to the search text – says Ilic.

– Also, the results are displayed in Cyrillic as an additional way of encouraging the use of Cyrillic. The interface itself, meaning the basic form where the search is entered and other pages, are written in Cyrillic – points out Ilic.

He also warns that the surge of Latin is big, that is, that Latin is used much more.

– As for technology, the technology is currently in favor of using Cyrillic and even Cyrillic, despite popular belief, is an extremely suitable script for internet searches, even better than Latin, and in several parameters, because Cyrillic is unambiguous, meaning one sound is one letter, we do not have, for example, a combination of two characters to have a sound – explains the creator of the Cyrillic search engine.

As far as statistics are concerned, currently ten percent of websites on the Serbian Internet use Cyrillic as the majority.

– Unlike the 90s and 2000s, now all the scripts of this world are equal to the Latin alphabet through the standard and there is no technological need not to use Cyrillic – emphasizes Ilic.

Thanks to the fact that Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic imagined and conceived the script according to the phonetic principle - meaning one sound, one letter - he thus, perhaps unsuspectingly at the time, which was the nineteenth century, created a script that is very suitable for Internet searches.

Durbin

Dejan Ilić

Serbian internet search engine

Cyrillic script