‘Sawafi’ an Arabic language search engine is scheduled to be launched in the last quarter of 2006. As the Saudi-German venture almost set to launch the search engine, it is likely to pose a major challenge to other search engine giants like Google and Yahoo.



As of now there is no fully dedicated Arabic Internet search engine available for the user. However, Sawafi aspires to emulate the extraordinary success of local Chinese language search engine Baidu, which is making waves among over 100 million users.



Though there is still low penetration of Internet in the Arab world but it is expected to increase substantially in the time to come. At present around 100 million web pages in Arabic are available for viewing which constitute only 0.2 per cent of the total.



However, the number of Arabic users is expected to shot up to 43 million by the year 2008 from just 16 million in 2004. ‘Sawafi’ is likely to be dependent on its partners and marketing agencies available in Dubai and the other side of the story is that it has already an untapped Arabic market available for its business.



Via CNN