Several incentives have been introduced to promote the use of local search engines, said the head of Iran’s Communications and Information Technology Research Center.
Alireza Yari added that state organizations have been told to integrate the use of local search engines in their official websites, local technology website ICT Press reported.
“There have been negotiations with some major bodies such as the Ministry of Education to further promote the use of local search engines among students,” he said.
Yari noted that a team of 400 researchers have been monitoring the popularity of both foreign and local search engines and the latest results show that Google, the local search engine Parsijoo (meaning “Search” in Persian) and Bing are the top three search engines in Iran.
“With a large margin from Parsijoo, Google stands at first place,” he said.
“For each Iranian that uses Parsijoo, there are 100 Iranian citizens using Google.”
The official noted that this shows locally developed search engines still remain largely unknown to Internet users in Iran.
He explained that this is mainly because of the predominantly mistaken mentality of Iranian Internet users who believe local technologies are only developed to impose limitations.
“Others believe that the quality of local search engines are poor and they cannot compete with global giants such as Google,” he said.
Yari said local search engines Yooz and Parsijoo remain largely unknown among users. He added that the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology has so far focused on funding these projects so that the developers would help improve quality.
“Despite the fact that the local search engines have not been advertised on a large scale, the number of views on the two engines have been steadily increasing,” he said.
The official added that an average of 500,000 users refer to the search engines daily.
Yari stressed that to further promote the use of local search engines, a wider advertising is needed.
According to Mehr News Agency, a member of the Strategic Council of Local Search Engines, the secretary of High Council of Cyberspace and CEOs of Iran’s National Cyberspace Center met on Saturday to review the policies for developing local search engines.
The framework of monitoring the projects and details of the plan’s implementation were among the issues discussed. The top priorities were outlined during the meeting, such as developing the labs, tools and infrastructures.
Areas that need to be developed were stressed, including news analysis, machine translation, smart advertising map, and image and scientific document searches.
