Searching in Arabic ? Use Araby.com
Being first is nothing new to Maktoob, the provider of the first arabic email service.. Early this morning the Arabic Search Engine Araby.com making it the first arabic search engine. Samih Toukan, CEO of Maktoob announced it in his blog few hours ago.
Wait a minute! you are saying first ? there were search engines before.. or at least attempts .. Well, yes, I am saying first. The “Search Service” attempts that was before didn’t succeed, mostly because of the lack of coverage, lack of funding, or the lack of Arab language understanding. Many “Directory Search” sites pretended to be Web Search, while it was far from it. A Directory search have records of hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of sites, with their information, and when you search, you match the site information. A search engine is far more than that, it is covering 10s of millions of Arabic pages, and storing relations between pages, and links between them, and different forms of the texts in the body, and more.. all that to bring a speedy and accurate search results.
Now I must say that I had been involved in Araby for the last months, and so, you might not take my word for it, but I am telling you, when it comes to searching in Arabic, Araby.com is by design, and practice a powerful engine. A query and a document goes through several stages of linguistic analysis and modification to provide users with the best and maximum matches possible. Can you remember the number of times you search in arabic in the global search engines such as Google (which I adore) or Yahoo, and turned down with poor results due the possible variations of Arabic language. try to search for any word in google, and put a simple Harakat, Hamza on Alef, or other variation, and notice the drastic difference in results. For someone to “claim” to be best in Arabic, those need to be taken in consideration, and we did.
One thing that a blogger will be familiar with in the home page of Araby is the Top Searches, in a “Tag Cloud”, as well, we implemented many Web 2.0 design and technology concepts, that should maximize the user experience. Another thing that a visitor will notice is that there are different search “types” or as they are called around here “Verticals”, the verticals where designed according to user feedback, and knowledge of Arabic web, which Maktoob have. Islamic, Blogs, Forums, Pictures, and News could be considered the first set of verticals that are designed for Arab users.
One thing for sure, Araby.com, and the verticals in it have a long way to go with development, We only released early to give users a peak into what is cooking, and get feedback on it. So, please send it forward.. and pass it forward.. I can tell you with complete confidence that the next very few weeks still have many features and enhancements that didn’t make it to the beta launch, so stay tuned, and make sure to bookmark it :)