The Web is a repository of huge amount of information among other sources of information usedrnin the day-to-day activities of human being. Moreover, this information may be presented inrndifferent languages. Retrieving information from the Web requires the presence of searchrnengines. There are general purpose search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. These generalrnpurpose search engines are mainly designed for English language. Shortcomings of these searchrnengines are reflected when they are applied to non-English languages such as Afaan Oromo asrnthey lack specific characteristics of such languages.rnThis research work came up with design and prototype of a search engine for Afaan Oromorntexts. The search engine mainly consists of three components â€“ crawler, indexer, and queryrnengine that are optimized for Afaan Oromo.rnThe crawler downloads documents and then filtering of these documents for Afaan Oromo isrndone by the categorizer subcomponent of the crawler. Next, documents that are identified asrnAfaan Oromo are preprocessed and stored in an index for later retrieval. Finally, queries suppliedrnin an interface to the query engine component are preprocessed, checked for a match in thernindex, and matched documents are displayed through an interface in a ranked order.rnPerformance evaluation of the search engine is conducted using selected set of documents andrnqueries. According to precision-recall measures employed, 76% precision on the top 10 resultsrnand an average precision of 93% are obtained. Experiment on some specific features of thernlanguage against the design requirements is also made.rnKey words: Information Retrieval, Search Engine, Categorizer, Afaan Oromo