Ux|Soup

Well, as I predicted a few months back when Yahoo bought Maktoob, Yahoo started creeping in the Arabic search engine market (doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out), unfortunately though, my question on LinkedIn was deleted from the group Arabic Search Engine Marketing for some weird reason.

Anyways, I ran a few tests on several search engines, Araby, Ayna, Bing, Google, Yahoo/Maktoob. I came to a small conclusion;

Araby: it should be an all exclusive entertainment search engine if it wants to survive. Other than that it has no chance. A full on search engine was not made for Araby. And it’s time to start using a proper engine with a proper algorithm. Enlarge your video/image/audio index or Google will swallow the rest of what’s left of it. Some usability issues.

Ayna: it should be a an all exclusive local search engine if it wants to survive.Other than that it has no chance. A full on search engine was not made for it. And it needs to start using a proper engine with a proper algorithm. Better maps are needed ASAP or else Google will swallow the rest of what’s left of it. Major usability issues.

Bing: retire please (or start building proper options for the search engine, results wise it is O K)

Google: Usability, results, options, diversity, overall, still the king with no real threat at all (yet?). Downside, they have to plug the map/local search, saw a few shy attempts, they have to unleash all the data they are getting for FREE from US the USERS!

Yahoo/Maktoob: Considering it’s relatively new in the Arabic market, it is O K, results are O K, but lacks basic functionality just like Bing. Shape up fast or die. (Even though it’s the default search engine on Maktoob, it won’t help much, we saw the same failed attempt by Araby…)

Now the comparison chart, it’s not that extensive, but it gives you a pretty good idea of the major differences between the search engines. All answers marked NO didn’t work at the time of the writing of this post (Feb 8th, 2010) if it is working please take a screen-shot and get in contact so I can update.

The search term means “The Elements of Social Architecture” I wanted to try something “different” they all got the good results except Ayna, the first two results were totally irrelevant.

Anyways I decided to go “smart” a bit and search for:

• “Weather Cairo/ احوال الطقس في القاهرة”. All engines failed (note that in English it works perfectly on Google and Bing)
• “Cafe in Dubai/مقهى في دبي “. All engines failed (again in English it shows Google maps with Local Business Results, I was expecting Ayna to show some results since they have maps in Arabic and boast about it)

The only “unusable” features that Araby and Ayna have is the Arabic keyboard (note the “unusable”) Google added transliteration service in their lab but it’s not as good as Yamli’s (it ROCKS!) and not available on the search engine directly…yet.

Anyways here are few screen-shots