Some countries are giving out free Internet, others are making it a legal right. But Turkey has its sights set on even higher goals, providing all of its 70 million citizens with an email address and creating its very own search engine to replace the untrustworthy Googles and Bings of the world. The head of Turkey’s communications watchdog said that the project was well underway and that the search engine should be going live as soon as 2010.
The motivation behind the grand project comes from the security concerns of relying on a service operated in a foreign country. Tayfun Acarer, chairman of Turkey’s Information Technologies and Communication Board, wants to eliminate this risk and dependency by building a home-grown search engine. “All internet communication data goes to foreign countries and then it returns. This activity has a security aspect,” Acarer said.
Furthermore, most popular search engines today don’t offer much support for Arabic languages, Acarer claims, making it hard for many people to use them. “I believe that our search engine will be popular in Turkic countries and Muslim countries and I am confident that these countries will trust our search engine,” he added. He obviously hasn’t heard of ImHalal, to name one.
Along with the search engine announcement, he al… (read more)