Why Halalgoogling Doesn't Work With Islamic Search Engines

Why Halalgoogling Doesn't Work- If you've heard of Islamic search engines and tried them, you've probably come to the same conclusion as us: they don't work.

The necessity to search the internet safely has been a great catapult for many businesses throughout the world, starting with child-friendly material such as Yahooligans (later branded as Yahoo! Kids) and Google SafeSearch, to name a few examples.

With 1.5 billion Muslims throughout the world, the second faith in numbers of practicioners in the world, that are concerned about the type of content their children and even themselves are exposed to, the necessity for an Islam-aware search engine becomes apparent.

Halalgoogling is a great example of a technologie born of that necessity. But in this difficult market necessities are not the only thing that matter to triumph.

We are going to talk about Islamic search engines and Halalgoogling as the great example of mistakes made that doesn't allow this search engines work as intended and how that can change in a future (or not).

What Is Halalgoogling?

For Muslims, a new search engine has been approved by Islam. In 2013, a search engine for Muslims was launched as a method to allow many observant Muslims who are unable to "Google" something. Strict Islamic morals may make the Internet dangerous, with NSFW content such as naked women and sacrilegious stories lurking around every corner.

How Halalgoogling Works?

The site culls information from other big search engines, such as Google and Bing, while suppressing results mentioning pornography, homosexuality, gambling, and other topics, according to the Tribune.

Words like "nude" are forbidden. Please respond to this message: You may have searched for Haram (forbidden) content if no results were found.

Haramis an Arabic phrase that refers to any deed or conduct that breaches Allah's laws, according to Halalgoogling's blog.

The search engine was established to "satisfy the Internet demands of the Muslim community, so that each Muslim can surf the online in the Halal way," according to the project's mission statement. There are 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide.

Halalgoogling (see TNW ME's complete evaluation here) was spot on in explaining what eventually led to Halalgoogling plummeting from 800,000 visitors after only one month to less than a tenth of that amount.

How Filters Work?

Filtering By General Category

Filtering search results by various categories.

Sites that aren't allowed to be visited – The following is a list of websites that are not permitted to display in search results.

Link Filtering

Link filtering is the process of removing only specific pages or links from a website, blog, or forum.

Haram Keywords

A list of keywords that cannot be searched or used to search the entire internet (only certain trusted sites).

Halalgoogling Under Proof Of Work

When Medialicious tried to use the "haram filter" on Halalgoogling, which was introduced in 2013, search phrases like "playboy" returned no results.

But the site appears to be a better approach to filtering out offensive search results, but after testing it for a few days, it appears that this search engine has yet to prove efficient, especially when considering the fact that it provides image results (which imhalal does not) that lack the sophistication to filter out results from querying images of a simple term like Bikini.

In the meantime, searches like "pornography" brought up a list of dictionary meanings. A list of dictionary definitions and Islamic religious websites appeared when you typed in "Resurrection of Jesus."

Websites like Halalgoogling, in our opinion, attempt to filter out search keywords rather than search results, which looks to be a big weakness in their algorithm, which takes its results from Google itself via Yahoo! BOSS.

That mean that Halalgoogling doesn't work? Not really but that mistake made that the spread of this engine never happen and explain the low amount of users they have.

Other Services Offered By HalalGoogling

It also contains specific search options, as well as a forum for Islamic discussion and educational Islamic elements, in addition to its "haram" filtering mechanism.

Is It a Trustworthy Search Engine?

"We regret for any unintended error that we could have made or could make in the future," the beta site and its designers said in case a user sees any haram information that may have slipped between the results.

Users are invited to report any information that is "contrary to the precepts of Islam" or that they believe should be removed from the Haram screening system.

So users can't really trust in this system to avoid "Haram" results by now resulting in critics about the system and many potential users just ignoring the platform.

Parents and Muslims could be more trusting if they had filtered out answers to inquiries like to forums or complex keywords searches that can lead to disguised forums and other non-desired results.

The platform still need more work to really be capable of accomplish the goal of appropiate filter all non allowed material.

But that requires of investment and technology that maybe the company can't afford regarding the visitors of the search engine in order to make Halalgoogling work.

Conclusion

To summarize, the market of muslim search engines has yet to be satisfied, and we expect that with the establishment of research institutions around the region and Islamic nation, this specialized and in-demand instrument will be produced.

However, due to a lack of investment in the high-tech industry and outstanding firms that promote working in search engines, artificial intelligence, and data, it is quite likely that no company will ever address this problem.

All we can do till then is offer suitable advise and hope for the best with the resources that are now available, with the expectation that HalalGoogling will begin working well soon.