A steering committee is set to be established at the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology which will work towards launching a national internet search engine, Mizan news agency reported on Saturday.
The announcement was made on the sidelines of a meeting with the technical committee of the ministry, Mahmoud Va’ezi the telecom minister said, adding that the group will be comprised of representatives from the country’s ICT research Institute, Information Technology Organization of Iran, Communications Regulatory Authority of Iran, and three private sector representatives.
The responsibilities of the steering committee, according to Va’ezi, will include maintaining coherence in the process of conducting the search engine project for the National Information Network (NIN) – also known as Internet-e Paak or the “Pure” Internet, which will be an alternative independent countrywide network whose content is compatible with Islamic values.
“The search engine will support Persian script and language,” said the minister, adding that the IT Organization of Iran has been working on developing national search engines and data processing tools for the Persian language in recent years.
“The national search engine will be used to provide services in e-government, e-health, e-banking, and e-education,” said Va’ezi.
This newly proposed 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 recent Alexa ranking put the site at 41,577th most used website within Iran well behind the major foreign data providers.
