ImHalal.com – First Islamic Halal Search Engine
For the first time now, there is an Islamic search engine which aims at providing a general purpose search that is free of “haram” content, i.e. offensive contents that contradicts with Islamic laws and beliefs. The search engine is wisely called ImHalal.com, and I bet we will see widely increased interest in such a service from conservative people, and parents who want to keep their kids off the harmful web contents.
To reach it’s Halal goal, the site seems to be using two methods. One is by filtering out “Haram” sites and contents, and this can be seen clearly from the Image search, which is still in Beta. When searching for various keywords or celebrity names for example, results from ImHalal.com are much more decent in this regard than Google and Yahoo in their strict mode.
The other method, which I don’t like as much, is the black listing of keywords, ranking them with “Haram” scale of 1 to 3. If the “Haram” level is 1 or 2, you get a warning plus an option to move forward.
Annoying but bearable. The bad thing about it is, it seems to have no intelligence in it, as it blindly blocks Haram words disregard of the actual context or full search or purpose. Example?
Breast is a black listed word, disregard of what you’re really looking for. Even “Wire Stripper” is a level 3 Haram word for including Stripper. I love wire strippers :(.
And the devil word Haram is also a level 3.
Now here it completely misses the point. There is a difference between doing wrong, and reading about what’s wrong. And trust me, offensive sites won’t use the word Haram anyways. It doesn’t help their marketing. Add to that that you can actually search for Haram in Arabic حرام and it works. I have also managed to pass through several bad words, and reach some blocked sites eventually. So this paradigm isn’t the best. Some intelligence needs to be built-in.
Now as to where does this magic come from, It’s still unclear. Is it an engine built in-house? If so, credible search engines usually list their IPs and spider name for webmasters to allow or deny it. But I couldn’t find anything in my log reports. I wasn’t able also to tie it to any of the famous search engines. Is it powered by any of them, or any other service? Usually there would be some information about the source of those indexes, but not here.
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Comments
[...] To reach it’s Halal goRead more at http://blogallalong.com/2009/09/02/imhalal-com-first-islamic-halal-search-engine/ [...]
i agree, “a journey of a 1000 miles begins with a single step”. at least they decided to take it, good luck to them with it :)
I think it’s just stupid, though I know I’m rushing into my conclusion but from the results you got.
You want your kids to surf responsibly, educate them oo khalas.
The name is weird, like searching for meat or something, I think it’s lame. Indeed it blocks according to keywords which is retarded.
I hate when they force restriction as if we don’t know any better!
Maryam: LOL… I thought you would take it better :). I hate it too. But face it, some people do want to avoid bad results, and this might be a relief for them.
My kid ends up anywhere. I just hope he doesn’t place Amazon orders anytime soon :P
INFACT IT IS A GIANT STEP FOR MANKIND.IT IS SAFE SEARCH INGINES FOR CHILD TEENAGERS AND FOR ALL MUSLIMS.I WAS EAGERLY LOOKING FOR SUCH SEARCH ENGINES TOCONTROL OUR SATANIC EMOTIONS.MAY GOD REWARD U FOR THIS TASK.
WHAT A MARVELLOUS DISCVERY U HAVE MADE.CONGRATULATION! THIS SEARCH ENGINES HELP US TO KEEP ALOOF FROM THE UNWANTED AND HARAM SITES.IT IS CHILD PROOF,PRONE PROOF ENGINES WHICH WILL STOP US TO REACH SINFUL WEBSITES.IT WILL MAKE A HALAL AND PAAK CULTURE IN FUTURE.
seriously I’m assuming the above two comments are spam!
We had a meeting with a web filtering service, websense, and what they do is include human factor that categorizes websites discovered daily. They don’t depend on crawlers that index sites depending on content and keywords only, because it can never compare to human conclusion … yet!
Let’s say a person types in a “haram” word “sex” what they can do is exclude the results not the keyword itself, which I think is totally STUPID, there are medical, social, legitimate sites that come under that word.
You get my point, I hate it when they come up with these stuff under Islamic intentions! Ridiculous. Thank you, but I’m sticking to Google :D
nesar ahmed & KASHIF KAMRAN: Thanks. Although I still see it needs a lot run.
Maryam: Hmm I dunno, possibly but not sure :).
The false-positive filtering of sites you mentioned is exactly why I hate filtering and decide to go open. Google FTW.
[...] To reach it’s Halal goRead more at http://blogallalong.com/2009/09/02/imhalal-com-first-islamic-halal-search-engine/ [...]
this site is a complete []….
search the word “love”,,, and it replies “Oops! Your search inquiry has a Haram level of 1 out of 3. This means that the results fetched by ImHalal.com could be haram!”
muddassir ladiwala: I think it will get attention, but it still needs a lot of work.
harris: The word filtering is not quite as it should be.
THANKS MARIYUM BI FOR HER COMMENTS.IS IT NOT NECESSARY TO HAVE A WATCHDOG ON TEENAGERS NOT TO SERVE MORALLY SOCIALLY THE HARAM SITES WHICH INSTIGATES EVEN OLDERS WHILE SERVING RELIGIOUS SITES.INFACT SUCH HALALSEARCH ENGINES WILL A ROLE OF MORAL GUARDIAN.
i never thought i’d see a search engine like this! but your testing does show it needs alot of tweaking.