At just 19 years old, the Peruvian Héctor Díaz created Konlap, a web search engine that received a $150,000 sponsorship from Microsoft For Startups. This innovation works with more than 100 languages, including Quechua and Aymara.
as described in his web page, Konlap seeks to “reduce the language barrier on the Internet, by allowing Internet users to find and access information in more than 100 languages.”
Díaz was born in Luya Viejo, Amazonas region, northern Peru. In his childhood he read physics books, and when he got access to the internet, he discovered a new world. But the language limitation was notable: more than 60% of the information on the network is in English.
Only 3% is in Spanish. Bengali, with more than 260 million speakers on the planet, barely has 0.1% of information on the web.
Faced with this concern, Díaz decided to act.
The development of Konlap, the search engine created by the young Héctor Díaz
“People, due to lack of incentives, do not learn English, and in the long term that affects education,” says Díaz in an interview granted to the Peruvian agency Andina. “Search engines are a key tool for people to access information not only in English, but also in other languages.”
Using his programming resources, Díaz began working on Konlap in 2021. In just two and a half hours (!), he already had an initial prototype that he has been improving. That’s Konlap’s portal.
Since then, Díaz’s initiative has added financing such as that of emerging ventures, a scholarship program Mercatus Center, the George Mason University and Microsoft For Startups.
The division of the company created by Bill Gates gave 150 thousand dollars to Konlap, according to Andina.
The expansion of the Peruvian programmer project
Currently, the initiative of the young Peruvian programmer It already has 35 million visits on the Internet. “It is a large enough quantity to validate the product in the foreign market,” he told Andina.
“We are going to universalize access to information, and we want to start with Peru, with the people who speak Quechua or Aymara, our people”, Diaz stressed. “Then we also want to help other people. We are going to expand especially in East and Southeast Asia, where there are huge populations that still have very low content on the Internet.”
“I think that Konlap is going to improve educational levels in many countries, because currently searches do not work the same for people due to differences in content. In Spanish or English we can feel lucky that we are looking for something and we find it, but the same does not happen in other languages”.