Yemen’s first multi-source search engine to be launched

DavyBUK · #1 (**permalink**) 05-29-2007, 01:46 PM

Yemen’s first news crawling and search engine dedicated to all things Yemeni, YemenPortal.net, is expected to officially launch this week, coinciding with the celebration of the 17th anniversary of national unification.YemenPortal.net is a newsgathering and sorting system similar to Google, except that it is dedicated to Yemen. The portal is currently exclusively designed to crawl and index news items from the dozens of Yemeni news websites, but will in the future expand to include other sections, such as business, tourism, and community-related services.

The search engine is co-founded and managed by Walid al-Saqaf, former publisher and editor of the Yemen Times.
“The main aim out of this initiative is to encourage free speech by expanding the horizons of online media originating from Yemen,” al-Saqaf said in an exclusive interview with the Yemen Observer. “It is a step towards enabling and empowering every big or small Yemeni news website to have a say in a growing and increasingly competitive cyberspace.”

It is also is co-founded and represented in Yemen by Irene Knehtl, a consultant, researcher and writer for a variety of local and international academic and media institutions. On the occasion of the official launch, Knehtl describes YemenPortal.net as a source of inspiration and a potential premium portal on the Internet for events happening inside Yemen. She emphasized the need to encourage online news sites that “have taken up the burden of providing the public with news and quality content voluntarily, and their efforts need to be appreciated.” Knehtl said that the Yemeni news websites currently in the YemenPortal.net system include independent, opposition, and governmental sources.

“We are still in our initial phase and are expanding, we are expected to add more sources as we go along and welcome feedback from users’ and sources.” “This project is to inform the people of what is going on in Yemen and how information is represented by all different news sources which may be governmental, in opposition, independent, Arab, and international. The Internet’s role as a medium to receive information will no doubt become more significant in the future for Yemen and the world.

Therefore, we decided to bring together a search engine that crawls all Arabic and English major news outlets in Yemen and presents them in a searchable and informative matter,” al-Saqaf said.“How many times have you been frustrated by having to go through each and every news website to know what is new about Yemen? Global search engines such as news.google.com don’t crawl and index all news websites and are sometimes difficult to use to get news from Yemen or on Yemen only.

full story link below -

http://www.yobserver.com/front-page/10012273.html

Rubber Duck · #2 (**permalink**) 05-29-2007, 02:23 PM

Thanks. Yes, interesting to see how this pans out.

There is the assumption that Google will become an all consuming global monopoly, but the truth is that it still has a lot to prove. Yandex, Baidu and Yahoo Japan all dominate their own local markets. Perhaps Google will not be able to simply brush local interests aside and that the model of one global search engine is perhaps flawed.