New Arabic search engine may challenge Google, Yahoo

A Saudi-German venture hopes to become the Baidu.com of the Gulf...

[bobothecat]

A Saudi-German plan to launch a dedicated Arabic language search engine for the World Wide Web could revolutionize the moribund Arabic Internet market, a senior official in the project said.

[money.cnn.com...]

[bill]

Interesting find bobothecat. I notice that the writers are using Baidu as comparative engine rather than Google. Has the Baidu-model become that well known? I guess I'm so used to seeing everyone comparing themselves to Google in the SE world that this stuck out.

Sawafi has a website here: [sawafi.com...] but it's just an "under construction" page now. We'll have to keep an eye on this one.

[bobothecat]

Sawafi is aimed at the Arab world of 280 million people, where Internet penetration is low.

Also found this to be interesting... that's a lot of potential customers/eyes.

With Baidu.com and now this, perhaps we're seeing the beginning of the 'new' local search.