4 Iranian Search Engines to Know About

Although Iranians love using the services of giant search engines such as Google and Yahoo, every once in a while we hear the launch of a new domestic search engine developed by Iranians. Here are four of them for you to know about.

Domestic search engines could greatly help save the internet bandwidth costs in Iran. These search engines could greatly help the Persian speaking community to find more locally specific searches. Since a couple of years ago, Iran’s government has been supporting a number of locally developed search engines in hopes of gaining some of the traffic going to giant search engines.

Although some of these local search engines are working conveniently, many Iranians are still hesitant to use their services. One reason could be the lack of trust from the users. Another reason could be that many Iranians think the results of those domestic search engines are filtered.

Google and Yahoo are still the top visited websites in Iran according to Alexa ranking, while non of these local search engines can be found in the top results of website rankings. Russia’s Yandex, China’s Baidu and South Korea’s Naver are some the successful cases which have been able to compete with Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Here are four Iranian search engines which are trying to take a share in this market.

Yooz

Yooz, meaning Cheetah is one of the well-known search engines in Iran which was founded in 2010. This Iranian search engine made some noise in February when it was announced that the company had received 2 million dollars of funding with the help of the government. According to the CEO of Yooz, 25 million Iranians use Google’s search engine daily and this is higher than countries such as Germany and France. This could be a great chance for Yooz to acquire Iranian users if they provide quality service to the Persian speaking community. Up until februrary, Yooz announced that they have stored the data of more than one billion Iranian websites in their servers and they are planning to have 30 percent share of the searches done by Iranians. Aside from being able to search for specific keywords, users on Yooz, can also search for news, blogs and images.

Rismoon

Rismoon translated into English as “string”, claims to be the first search engine for Persian content. The website was launched in 2004 by a private company which claims that has not received any funding by other private or governmental organizations. Rismoon has a feature called “Zoom Search” which lets the user to search for the keywords in a specific topic or area such as poetry and literature. The website also stores the data of Iran’s telephone directory of businesses known to most locals as “118”.

Salam

Salam is not a stand-alone search engine but rather an Iranian “Meta Search Engine”. Salam searches for the keywords in a couple of search engines simultaneously and shows an optimal combination of all of them. Salam (which is still in its beta phase) benefits from an Artificial Intelligence system and uses advanced mathematical models to bring more accurate results for sPersian keywords. Salam is backed by Bayan, a software company that also offers other domestic services such as blog, email and file hosting. Bayan is currently developing a Persian search engine called Zal.

Parsijoo

Parsijoo is yet another Persian search engine developed by Iranians. The beta version of the website was available in 2010. Parsijoo became commercially available in November 2015 with over one billion indexed web pages. The website has the ability to search for various content such as text, audio, video, image and downloadable files and apps. Some of the other features include an online dictionary, map, job board and news section. Users can also search for a specific item on the Bazaar section of Parsijoo and see the results in 20 Iranian e-commerce websites.