‘Oh Lord’: Iran at Work on a Search Engine
People ask for Divine guidance on life decisions and matters of the heart, so why not on more mundane questions like: What is the capital of Azerbaijan?
With its new search engine, dubbed “Ya Haq” (that’s “Oh Lord” in Persian), Iran is seeking to take on Google and allow its people a non-Western (read: non-evil) option for online fact-finding.
According to a Sunday article in The Media Line, the service will debut in 2012. Some sources implied that the new site will just be the first step in developing an Iranian intranet that will only allow access to approved sites.
“The discussion began a few years ago and is based on a feeling that the Internet is a Western weapon,” Pujan Ziaie, who works in IT for Iran’s opposition movement, told The Media Line. “They are threatened by it but they cannot ignore it so they are trying to imitate what China has done.”
An anonymous government source gave Media Line a different story, saying that Oh Lord would merely be a localized search engine, prioritizing content that is more relevant to Iranian users.
Whether the Lord actually fields the queries is not yet known. (P.S. It’s Baku.)
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
