Sawafi Arab Language Search Engine to Launch
Seekport is panning on launching the Arab language search engine “Sawafi” (“sandstorm”) later this year which will be specially designed to meet the challenges of the Arabic language. Sawafi will be the project of Dubai based Seekport Internet Technologies Arabia FZ-LLC,, a joint venture between Seekport and the MITSCO Group of Saudi Arabia.
From the release:
The Arabic Internet search market is currently one of the most dynamic and least exploited worldwide, with an estimated 24 million users in 2005 – and as many as 43 million users expected by 2008.
The contracts for the joint venture were signed at the GITEX IT trade show in Riyadh on 23 April 2006, in the presence of Seekport and officials from MITSCO which is a leading provider of innovative technology solutions based in Riyadh.
“We will launch Sawafi this year. It will be the first search engine optimized for the Arabic language, said Hermann Havermann, managing director of the new Seekport Internet Technologies Arabia, at the contract signing ceremony in Riyadh. “This joint venture is pioneering work, because it is the first Internet search engine to take up seriously the challenges of the Arabic language and culture.”
Interesting info on Arabic and Search:
* The ten most popular websites in the Arabic region account for between 16 and 70 million page-impressions.
* Estimates put the total number of Arabic language websites at around 100 million at the present time, doubling every year – which is only a very small proportion of the total worldwide Internet content of more than 12 billion sites.
* One of the reasons for this is the very high requirements that the Arabic language makes for Internet search engines. Current search algorithms in the usual Internet search engines are hardly capable of observing even the simplest morphological conditions required to process Arabic-language contents in a meaningful way for users.
It’s an interesting subject to have Arabic Search engine, but will they be able to run Arabic Adsense ads on the publisher’s web sites and how are they going to address the relevancy of such ads as it’s unlike the English words, an Arabic spilled word can have different meanings.
Anyhow, good luck to them.
Khalid.
I don’t think they have any idea how to implement such algorithm.
Are there any investement options for Seekport or related companies?
As for the ability or inability to comprehend or implement the algorithm, then I don’t think that is much of a problem. The main issue might be to agree on a certain code of values or conduct, since the Arab World is so diversified. You have extremely liberal, un-Islamic countries like Lebanon and Tunisia, and then you have the more Extremist societies, not countries, within the Gulf.
Another issue might be, the quality of the editors put in place. Google has some good editors put in place to filter things out. With the many slang forms of Arabic, these days… It might be hard to find the appropriate editors to categorize things within their own respective areas.
We did a review on it, check it out:
http://muslim-tech.blogspot.com/2006/05/is-sawafi-google-killer.html
Thank you for the info.
Hi everybody,
It is now Feb 2008 since this project was suppose to launch but I don’t see any progress from both sides. I hope everything is going as planned.
Thanks
Khalid Alabid
It is sad they were not able to advance and work further on this project. Now , most countries have search engines with their native language- Spanish, Italian, German, Hebrew, Chinese, etc.
It is either that globalization wave had swallowed the investor on this project, so they feel it will not bring them any material benefit, or they have not got real support from others. This project needs real support and cannot be done by one source only.
But if they are following the 5 years plan of Arab governments:) this will take more 15 years at least.
شكراً و تحية عربية