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Wednesday, January 13, 2010

[MahdiUniteMuslims] New 'halal' search engine

 

New 'halal' search engine 
 
12 September 2009

 
JEDDAH – A new search engine, called ImHalal.com, filters out X-rated Web sites and other content that is "haraam" or forbidden by Islam.
 
http://www.imhalal.com/
 
The search technology developed by AZS Media Group, a Dutch Internet company, has a two-layer filter.
 
Sex sites are blocked outright while other topics that are less dicey, such as "drugs," "beer" or "pork" are restricted but not as tightly.
 
When users do a search and get a haram rating of level one or two out of three, they are advised to choose another keyword to search, but they can still continue their search if they believe the results fetched will be clean, said Reza Sardeha, founder of the media group in a published interview.
 
Words like porn and rape are considered to be at a rating of three, and are blocked, Sardeha told PC World. Terms like beer and pork, however, get a haram rating of one because users cannot consume them off the Internet.
 
The site has received more than 400,000 unique visitors since it was launched earlier this week, Sardeha said in the interview.
 
"We got the feeling that a lot of people in the Middle East, a lot of Muslims, really avoided the Internet and prevented their children from accessing it because they were afraid of what they might come across," Sardeha said after ImHalal.com debuted this week.
 
Mainstream search engines have come in for criticism in many parts of the world for displaying content that is offensive to the local culture, and even against local laws.
 
ImHalal.com's promoters are considering using advertising as a revenue stream for the site, Sardeha said.
 

New Arabic search engine may challenge Google, Yahoo

A Saudi-German venture hopes to become the Baidu.com of the Gulf and its expatriates.

April 25, 2006

RIYADH, April 25 (Reuters) - A Saudi-German plan to launch a dedicated Arabic language search engine for the World Wide Web could revolutionize the moribund Arabic Internet market, a senior official in the project said.

The new web site, dubbed "Sawafi," is planned for the last quarter of 2006 and could set a tough challenge for international search giants such as Google (Research), Microsoft's (Research) MSN and Yahoo (Research), which offer a basic Arabic search capabilities at present.

"There is no (full) Arabic Internet search engine on the market. You find so-called search engines, but they involve a directory search, not a local search. There's nothing available for overall Internet search," Hermann Havermann, managing director of German Internet tech firm Seekport, told Reuters.

"If you look at the international search engines, their functionality is non-existent. This market really lacks the support of an Arabic search engine," he said.

Seekport unveiled the project with Saudi partner Integrated Technical Solutions in Riyadh this week. The company, Sawafi, is registered in the Gulf Arab business hub of Dubai.

Sawafi is hoping to copy the success of local Chinese language search engine Baidu.com (Research), which has made huge strides in a market with over 100 million Web surfers.

Sawafi is aimed at the Arab world of 280 million people, where Internet penetration is low. There are also large expatriate Arab communities in Europe and North America.

"There are only 100 million Web pages right now in Arabic, and that's nothing. It's only 0.2 percent of the total worldwide," Havermann said.

Research commissioned from Dubai-based Internet researcher Madar shows the number of Arabic Internet users could jump to 43 million in 2008 from 16 million in 2004, Havermann said.

According to Madar, 65 percent of Arab Internet users in 2005 could not read English, which accounts for 70 percent of the material on the Internet.

Better search engines are key to a turnaround.

"There is not enough Arabic content available on the Internet. But there's no motivation to put more Arabic content on the Internet as long as you don't have a system to find the content," Havermann said.

Saudi Arabia, with an affluent population of 24 million, and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, would be key places for winning online advertising to fuel Arabic search engines.

"Search engines are dependent on income from advertising, and for this you need partners and marketing agencies. They are in Dubai," Havermann said. "On the other side, the Arabic user market is in Saudi Arabia."

The Arabic online advertising market could grow to $150 million in 2008 from $10 million at present, he said. 
 

Search engines

How they work  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine
 

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