Dubai — With the Internet crowds increasing up in Arabian Peninsula, search engine behemoth Google, running after its arch rival Yahoo to capture the market share, yesterday in Dubai and Cairo, unveiled Ejabat (Answers), aimed at the Arabic language users on the web, developed by its Arabic Labs team. The service is similar to Yahoo Answers, but in real time, and in Arabic.
The online service unveiled Tuesday would allow Arab users to answer each other’s questions, a move designed to boost the amount of Web content available in Arabic.
The new service comes just two weeks after Yahoo Inc. has successfully acquired the biggest online Arabic portal Maktoob, aspiring to better serve the speedily expanding population of young and tech-savvy people in the Middle East, and as always Google did what it does better: break in raw markets.
Google decided to introduce its tool, called Google Ejabat after the Arabic word for “answers,” after observing many of its Arabic users’ searches failed to turn up relevant results. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company estimates that less than 1 percent of information online is in Arabic.
“We recognize that users are the best at answering each other’s questions within a community and this product is the perfect way to be able to share and contribute information,” said Wael Ghonim, the company’s product and marketing manager for the Middle East and North Africa.
Google already delivers some other Arabic-language search services, in addition to its Blogger publishing service that is also favorite among the region’s growing corps of online writers.
Google Egabat applies the same platform distributed on Google’s help forums in October 2008, which we noted at the time took its looks and feature set from Yahoo Answers.
Unlike the earlier avatar of Google Answers (shut in 2006), Google Egabat is not adopting a payment system, and instead uses a reputation and incentive system that gives members the chance to earn points. The points system, as with the one used by Yahoo Answers, allows users to accumulate points that they can use to ask their own questions. Differently from Yahoo, users can then transfer points to the person who delivers the best answer to their question.
The company does not offer a similar service like Egabat in any other language, but has introduced a related tools in Russian, Chinese and Thai, Dubai-based spokeswoman Joanne Kubba said.
“We pushed it ahead in Arabic since we know it to be a very useful tool to help generate … content,” she said.
Users start with 20 free points that they can spend on asking questions and 10 points in reputation points. All actions on the site deliver points, from logging in, rating questions and answers, and in depth participation.
Basically, users can register as “experts” who will answer questions on certain topics, and others can simply visit the site and ask a question, with the question answered (ideally) in something approaching real time by the pool of users who are online at that moment.
In essence the viability of the service very much depends on stimulating a critical mass of users participating. Without that mass, the whole thing will flop. With that mass, it could get very interesting.
The Arab world is abundant with a lot of “hidden knowledge” – things that are commonly known but not publicly known. The best recipes, the best shisha / shawerma place, the store that can fix your laptop for half the price of all the others – and lets not get started on directions and traffic tips. There is a lot of stuff already out there in the collective knowledge that has yet to make it online, and if Egebat can get it out there, good luck to them.
On the Net: http://ejabat.google.com