I spoke to the regional manager of google, Sherif Iskander, a few days ago, and he told me that it was simply the size of Egypt that has attracted google here (time zones also were an issue).
Egypt has the region’s largest number of internet users as well as small and medium entreprises (and advertisers), the market segment that google’s business model is based upon. The booming tourism industry is a major client for google, and financial services which are underdeveloped in Egypt could become another major source of revenues soon.
But google can only sell its products if there’s content. Less then 1% of the internet’s content is in Arabic, although it is one of the world’s most spoken languages.
The research that Iskander referred to showed that 85% of the region’s internet users would in fact prefer content in Arabic. Google is thus working on creating more content. Until now, it has arabized its search function, its news portal and its email service. It also offers translation tools from English to Arabic and vice versa.
It also hopes to lower the significant cost barrier to local content, by offering advertising tools that automatically generate ads on local websites.
As access to the internet improves across the region – in Egypt ADSL prices came down recently – now it’s limited PC penetration and the lack of local content that is preventing the region from seeing higher numbers of internet users, it seems.
If Google is thinking og increasing Arabic content, then an all-Arabic http://blogger.com“ rel=”nofollow”>Blogger.com will be a wise decision, and although I am not a great font of them, an all-Arabic forum/mailing-list a la Yahoo! Groups, albeit much, much better.
The research that Iskander referred to showed that 85% of the region’s internet users would in fact prefer content in Arabic.Is this research published somewhere online?
I know the IDSC (Egyptian Information Decision Support Center) has done some surveys of IT use in Egypt that supported the idea that the majority favored Arabic. If you think about it, internet use in the Middle East has definitely begun to expand beyond the English-speaking elites so for the rest of the population Arabic content will be extremely important.
Green Data, I’m currently writing a report on the state of ICT in Egypt, if you want to get in touch. My email address is lrmahmood at gmail dot com.
Rashad, do you know of any surveys on Arabic content?
I’m wondering what the break-down is between media content, personal content (blogs, personal website, mailing lists) and commercial content, and how this break-down looks like for other languages.
In other words, in which areas Arabic content is underdeveloped, and why.
There is another problem with Arabic content on the web, even if we put aside that content written in Arabish (using Roman script). A good part of the web is not using Unicode (UTF-8), which creates a lot of unneccesary problems in the case of Arabic. Blogger, Yahoo! Groups most forums, together a good chunck of Arabic content I come Accross, are using windows-1256 or other encodings, and it causes a lot of confusion.
However, it would be good to see the numbers in a study.
Unfortunately, I haven’t found anything that really does an in depth analysis of the arabic content on the web. The IDSC does however have a survey of Egyptian use of the internet. 52% of users chatted, 31% downloaded songs, 28% used e-mail, 27% browsed for general information and another 27% looked for study-related information.
If this is accurate, then it would seem to indicate that the content doesn’t matter so much yet, since only a fourth of people actually look for it. Of course, you could think of it as a chicken and egg problem. If you build it, they will come.
one more thing. I have an article on Arabization coming out in this month’s business monthly, in case anyone is interested. Should be out in a few days.
Google have arabised their search interface, but not their functionality. And even the UI Arabisation can benefit from a thorough review.
What I mean by arabising the search functionality is to make it compliant with the many peculiarities of Arabic language, script, and orthography.
I won’t be greedy as to demand a semantic-aware search engine that can try to answer a human-language question, yet.
http://zamakan.gharbeia.org/2006/09/11/220336“ rel=”nofollow”>I had written more on that a few days ago.
Their Arabic to English automatic translation is one step.