Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Arabic Search Engines

Several Arabic Search Engines are currently existing in the market, with a focus toward the Arabic community. Being the Sixth largest spoken language in the World with more than 250 million arabic speaker, with more than 70% of the population are between the age of 20-40, marketers eyeballs is starting to turn toward this population and their potential spending power on the internet.

In the United States, Arabic speaking communities are considered extremly important in ethnic TV both on line and in cable, as they are usually holding the lion share of subscribers base in those mediums.




Eyoon is a web directory for Arabic websites. Started in 1995. Mainly focusing on Arabic speaking countries



Araby is a new search engine that index arabic websites. Moreover, they index images, and blogs



4arab.net is another search engine. The indexed sites are still limited


Nesnas, which means "Monkey" is a large portal and search engine fo Arabic websites.



Arabiks.com
Arabiks is a small index, but it provides a CPC advertizing option
.



Arabiks.com
Ayna seems to a winner, in terms of indexing as well as provided portals services.

3 comments:

Prince Arabia said...

I spent sometime today testing all above Arabic search engine. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any replacement for Google or Yahoo for searching in Arabic content.

Please note that I am here not looking for the same size of index Google or Yahoo has (even for Arabic pages only). I know that this would be an extremely difficult task for a locally developed search engine using local expertise and limited funds. My main criteria were:

1. Quality of the search results: None of the Arabic search engines provided any sort of quality for their results (I am excluding here the directory search like Eyoon). Among the first results pages I have noticed the majority of sites are SPAM sites.

2. Relevancy matching and ranking: I haven’t noticed any relevancy matching criteria for the search terms I am looking for. Their ranking based just on site popularity (I guess).

3. Number of results: both Ayna and Araby are lying (big times). Come on guys who are you cheating???????? Rest of the mentioned search engine have very limited index and therefore I will not comment on their number of results.

4. Arabic support: Araby did nice job on supporting the Arabic language and specially (or only) the Hamza, Yaa Marbouta, etc… issues. However, Yahoo is doing much better in this area.


The above issues prevented me tackling other issues that should be addressed in evaluating search engines.

In short, I have to say Arabic search engines have a long way to go.

Anonymous said...

There is no doubt that the Arabic search engines are still in the infancy stage and to compare them with Google and Yahoo is just too much.The main thing that has been brought to focus in this post is that the number of internet users (other than those who speak only english) are growing in size day by day.Keeping this in mind,Multilingual marketing has started gaining popularity to feed this section of people.

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