A Tehran-based company, Shid Andish Dadepardazan Co., has announced it has created a new indigenously created search engine.
The search engine to be made within Iran is called “Yooz”, meaning cheetah in Persian.
According to Mehr news agency, the web developers say the search engine provides Iranian users with locally derived content and is catered for the Persian language script.
The search engine was launched on Sunday with the help of the telecommunications industry and with the support of ministry of communications and IT.
Its creator, Mehdi Naghavi, stated that Iran ranks 6th in the world in using the more famous Google search engine. “Iranian users visit Google 25 million times a day, which makes countries such as Germany, France and Italy fall behind Iran’s usage.”
Naghavi said that launching a domestic search engine would foil potential internet-related sanctions, introduce the Persian web to academia, and remove limitations placed on the users’ access due to the western sanctions imposed against Iran over a 12-year nuclear energy dispute.
Last November, the Financial Tribune reported that a steering committee was set up by the ministry of communications and IT to work towards launching a national search engine.
Some tech experts and web entrepreneurs have criticized the communications ministry for funding such projects as they state, “people who use Google, use it because they have Gmail and maps integrated, and Iranian startup search engines will never be able to catch up.” Another one when asked said, “I admire these startups, but how are they going to fund this business model in the long run, surely the ministry won’t want fund it forever.”
Recent criticisms of Yooz, is nothing new. In the cutthroat world of Iranian startups many budding tech experts and programmers have tried many times before to compete with the large US tech giants; however, due to lack of funds in many instances and fleeting support for these projects, many have fallen by the way side.
This latest search engine follows another attempt in 2013 called Gorgor, which had been touted as an Iranian alternative to American internet search engine giants like Google, Bing and Yahoo. However, a February 16 Alexa ranking put the site at 4,000th most used website within Iran well behind the US based competition.
