Iran State Bodies Told to Use Local Search Engines

The High Council of Cyberspace ruled this week that government organizations and education facilities must use locally developed search engines as part of a government policy to support local Internet firms.

The council, headed by President Hassan Rouhani, was created to develop and support local technology firms and help them compete with international rivals.

According to the new ruling, local search engines like yooz.ir and parsijoo.ir must be integrated in the default settings of the computers used by those institutions.

The measure is another bid to augment the appeal and growth of locally-made search panels which fall far behind giants such as Google in Iran.

Financial Tribune reported last November that both locally developed Persian language search engines rank far behind with Parsijoo ranked at 779 in popularity, in Iran.

“For each Iranian that uses Parsijoo, there are 100 Iranians using Google,”Alireza Yari head of Iran’s Communications and Information Technology Research Center said at the time.  

Yari said local search engines Yooz and Parsijoo remain largely unknown among users. He added that the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology had focused on funding these projects so that the developers would help improve quality.

However, Parsijoo had had some traction against international search engines with it beating Microsoft's Bing at one point in its push to attract search engine results.

However, the two search engines face an uphill battle as Google and Microsoft now implement their search engines into their own desktop and mobile software, like Cortana on Windows 10 and Google Now pulling users away from the local competitors through its mobile operating system called Android.