The question posed in this thesis is whether it is feasible to use commonly available computer hardware and software equipment found in the United States for querying a web-based native Farsi language search engine. A document conversion utility consisting of a C program called html2unicode was constructed to convert the native language web pages into a common format. A Javascript keyboard application and corresponding embeddable web server was developed to make native Farsi language input and output accessible to a search engine. Although there are some issues inherent in the conversion of Farsi web pages into a format suitable for searching, it is possible to use common hardware and software to retrieve Farsi documents
