Sawafi - a New Arabic Search Engine
I am not sure how akin this news story is to a press release, but Seekport wants to partner with an Arabic company to create an Arabic language search engine:
"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.
"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.
I am not sure if I like the idea of one company dominating the search space, but at the same time I think it could be equally bad if different cultures and languages used unique systems that were sorta cut off from other parts of the web.
Do local engines have a shot? If so, is search fragmentation a good or bad thing?
well, I'm a bit biased
but I'd have to say it's a good thing. But it's not search fragmentation that's happening here. What it is is niche marketing. And right now, that's how people can succeed in the search space against the three giants. You don't have to take all the search space, just your little corner. And do it better than the big folks that don't have time to look after the niche.
A very good example of this is Quebec in Canada. Forsaken by the three SE's, seperated by language, they've got a couple of their own search engines that everyone uses. IIRC, Google is actually a distant third in Quebec behind such sites as this french search engine and one other who's name escapes me at the moment.
Russia's another fine example of places where Google isn't dominant.
Like niche retailers near walmart (who contrary to common perception, actually do quite well) I think local search engines have a very good shot.
Russia's another fine
Exactly. Google takes around 15% marketshare here at the moment. Yandex takes 51% of the search market but has around 60% coverage for their contextual advertising. So yes, local engines definitely have a shot.
The main problem Google has here is that they can't deal with the Russian morphology as well as the locals.
I don't see Yandex as being cut off from the rest of the web (or Rambler and the others here) - their spiders are out indexing Russian language material very effectively and you can get your site manually included in under a week.
Runet is always going to be separated from the rest of the English speaking web due to the language barrier. Having everyone access the net through a regional Google portal doesn't address that.
There's a lot of misunderstanding about these other *nets though - for example I've found a lot of people have rather a bad opinion of the Russian Internet space. They seem to think that every site here is related to p*rn/warez or hacking. In fact there are over 180'000 web sites here and half a million domains sold - but the west only sees a certain (and usually bad) part of it.
I wonder how hard would be
I wonder how hard would be to spam to the top of that engine with all the words related to Ji-hads, Suicide Bombings, and terrorism to maybe fill it with propaganda urging people NOT to participate in this kind of behavior.