HOHHOT -- Northern China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region launched China's first Mongolian language search engine Friday, according to the region's ethnic affairs committee.

With the access to more than 200 Mongolian language websites, the search platform www.Joloo.cn is the first of its kind in China since the vertical writing of Mongolian makes the informatization of the language challenging.

The search engine team began the project in 2016 and developed an input method editor to overcome the technical difficulties.

Now, over 2 million people of the Mongolian ethnic group in China speak the language.

China has more than 6.5 million people of the Mongolian ethnic group, mainly in Inner Mongolia, Liaoning, Gansu, Xinjiang, and Qinghai.