Almotamar.net Yemen Observer - Yemen’s first news crawling and search engine dedicated to all things Yemeni, YemenPortal.net, is successfully and officially launched Saturday, coinciding with the celebration of the 17th anniversary of national unification.

YemenPortal.net is a newsgathering and sorting system similar to Google, except that it is dedicated to Yemen. The portal is currently exclusively designed to crawl and index news items from the dozens of Yemeni news websites, but will in the future expand to include other sections, such as business, tourism, and community-related services.

The search engine is co-founded and managed by Walid al-Saqaf, former publisher and editor of the Yemen Times.
“The main aim out of this initiative is to encourage free speech by expanding the horizons of online media originating from Yemen,” al-Saqaf said in an exclusive interview with the Yemen Observer. “It is a step towards enabling and empowering every big or small Yemeni news website to have a say in a growing and increasingly competitive cyberspace.”

It is also is co-founded and represented in Yemen by Irene Knehtl, a consultant, researcher and writer for a variety of local and international academic and media institutions. On the occasion of the official launch, Knehtl describes YemenPortal.net as a source of inspiration and a potential premium portal on the Internet for events happening inside Yemen. She emphasized the need to encourage online news sites that “have taken up the burden of providing the public with news and quality content voluntarily, and their efforts need to be appreciated.” Knehtl said that the Yemeni news websites currently in the YemenPortal.net system include independent, opposition, and governmental sources.

“We are still in our initial phase and are expanding, we are expected to add more sources as we go along and welcome feedback from users’ and sources.” “This project is to inform the people of what is going on in Yemen and how information is represented by all different news sources which may be governmental, in opposition, independent, Arab, and international. The Internet’s role as a medium to receive information will no doubt become more significant in the future for Yemen and the world.

Therefore, we decided to bring together a search engine that crawls all Arabic and English major news outlets in Yemen and presents them in a searchable and informative matter,” al-Saqaf said. “How many times have you been frustrated by having to go through each and every news website to know what is new about Yemen? Global search engines such as news.google.com don’t crawl and index all news websites and are sometimes difficult to use to get news from Yemen or on Yemen only.

Yemenportal.net covers almost all of them and is still expanding.” YemenPortal.net’s search engine has a variety of ways in which information can be displayed and sorted. Users can browse the latest news from a specific politically affiliated set of sources (such as opposition sources, for example). Results could be sorted based on updated time, the source, and the times they were read, etc. On average, the crawling engine could fetch and parse up to a thousand articles per hour. The founders believe that after investing in technology, infrastructure and in a professional cadre experienced in design and programming, YemenPortal.net could become one of the most inspiring pioneer Arab entrepreneur initiatives.

Millions of Yemenis or others interested in Yemen, from within Yemen and abroad, will be able to reach out to a common interface that enables them to find the latest news on Yemen with minimum effort. “From now on, with a single mouse click, you can get the latest updates (only minutes after source news websites posted them) all on one page and in a standard and easy to read manner. The portal also offers RSS services, which are a powerful means to stay updated automatically,” al-Saqaf added.Yemenportal.net applies the latest technology available for retrieving, parsing, and indexing information on a frequent basis, depending on the time of the day and the flow of information.

It has a flexible, dynamic interface that allows users to maximize their benefit by displaying news items in a customizable fashion, while remaining faithful to the copyright material as it maintains links to the sources and promoting them through exposure to new or unfamiliar users. The founders of the portal stress that apart from the users, the other main beneficiary of this service would be Yemeni online news service providers. Through YemenPortal.net, they will be expanding their readership base and enhancing their hits and popularity, given the expected growth and momentum that YemenPortal.net is expected to gain globally in the coming months and years.

According to al-Saqaf, the portal is “merely the first in a series of phases that we are going to take. The next phase will be to create a forum section in the portal where comments and contributions in popular forums will be crawled and indexed. Following that will be a phase to include tourism-related information and contacts to serve cyber users with as a bridge for all those interested in Yemen.”

“YemenPortal.net constitutes an entrepreneurial and pioneering effort not only in Yemen, but even in the Arab world. It is a vision based on the growth trends that the Internet is witnessing in the Arab world. As this growth will affect Yemenis like all other citizens in the world, it is only natural that YemenPortal.net and similar efforts will gain greater importance in the future.” al-Saqaf concluded.