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… Continue reading
I am brainstorming lately on how and what to present in a few days/weeks about user experience.
The audience will be folks (tweeple!), most are bloggers, all are internet savvy, but the vast majority is not familiar with user experience design.
I decided to take an ascending approach, just to familiarize everyone with UX and explain that UX is omnipresent and affects our daily lives…
What’s better… Continue reading
In a comment about yamli.com I was told that Ajnad.com is far superior and more accurate than Yamli.com
I thought it would be cool to compare both side to side, here’s what I got (click to enlarge)
I hate to say this, but this is a MAJOR fail. In the transliteration domain, Yamli is still king!… Continue reading
Souq.com has a new interface, it’s more like a bit of tweaking but still a lot is missing and the whole essence (experience) is still lacking. I know I know, “…but it’s working”.
Personally, I believe that it should go through a simple cycle, “functional, fast, pretty” It is functional (technically speaking); fast (again, technically speaking) but not pretty (usability/ux wise)
The dominant tool on souq.com is the… Continue reading
Dear Tweepi,
When you notify the user that he’s not “logged in” you have to provide him/her/it/so-so with a link or a way to actually sign in to use your services.
You are still in “beta”, you have a nice service going on there, so I’ll cut you some slack.
In my final post (till I can be bothered again) about search engines, Yamli is our star of this post.
I don’t really consider Yamli as being a search engine (calm down) it is a transliteration service, making it easy for users who do not type in Arabic or have an Arabic enabled keyboard to search using GOOGLE.
It is what Google (and ALL Arabic search engines) missed!… Continue reading
A quick review of souq.com done a month ago, nothing serious just skimming through the website.
After a quick review of Ayna and Araby’s layout, off to the goody stuff, the actual search experience.
I am really bad in typing Arabic, like really bad. Fortunately both search engines, Araby and Ayna, provide a nice feature, the virtual keyboard. How thoughtful for us who suck at typing in Arabic. Really thoughtful and extremely nice feature, till you use it!
I mean come on guys! using… Continue reading
we have to admit, local search engines around the middle east are not (for the time being) a threat to Google and if you look closely since they started popping up till now, it looks like they’ll never be.
I am gonna slice n’ dice (kind of) Ayna and Araby
Landing page:
Ayna
