OpenSearchCon India 2026

Most search systems are designed primarily for English. But what happens when we want search to truly understand regional languages like Tamil?

Tamil is one of the world’s oldest living languages with a rich literary tradition, yet building effective search for it comes with unique challenges such as complex morphology, script handling, tokenization, and language-specific relevance tuning.

In this talk, we share how we built an intelligent Tamil search system using OpenSearch. Using Tirukkural, the classic Tamil text of 1,330 couplets, as a practical dataset, we explore how OpenSearch can be adapted to understand Tamil queries and return meaningful results.

We’ll walk through practical techniques such as custom analyzers, tokenization strategies, stemming approaches, and relevance tuning for Tamil search. We’ll also demonstrate how users can search Kurals using natural Tamil phrases and still discover the most relevant verses.

Beyond Tamil, these techniques can help developers build better search experiences for many regional Indian languages bridging ancient knowledge with modern search technology.