Orascom Launches Mobile Search; Is Local The Turf Where White-Label Will Win The Battle Of The Search Engines? » mobilegroove

The usual suspects may have an edge in English-language mobile search, but are they a shoe-in elsewhere? Not likely. Orascom, a dotMobi investor, has shown real interest in using the dotMobi data services for mobile content. This week it took the wraps off onkosh.mobi, the mobile version of Orascom’s new Arabic-language search portal, onkosh.com. (It has been live in beta preview form for just over a year.)

This in-depth article from Tom Gara at Egypt’s Business Today underlines the opportunities for niche mobile search engines in the Arab-speaking world.

Drawing from an interview with Orascom board member Khaled Bichara, the post reports Orascom is confident about its chances to beat the likes of Google and Microsoft. “If you are looking at it from a total figure, yes, they are outspending us. But the Arabic part, the Arabic language has its own peculiarities, and if you compare their investments on Arabic versus ours, I don’t think it will be that much bigger.”

One feature that plays in the operator’s favor is the “Bel3araby” option allows users to type an Arabic search query in Latin letters. As the bulk of Arabic-speaking web users are accustomed to transliterating Arabic script into Latin text for chatting, forums and text messaging, the feature is likely to resonate with Web users who want to search the Arabic internet without needing to type in Arabic script. “We feel that it is features like Bel3araby that will give us the edge that will differentiate us from the big players.” Bichara says. “Our advantage will be that we have more relevance in local customization than the big players.”

Some other features worth mentioning: Onkosh News is an Arabic adaptation of Google News services and Onkosh File Search lets users search for downloadable files such as music and video wherever they are (attached to individual postings or available for sale via download sites). Tom tells us “such forums and download services account for an estimated 70% of Arab-world web traffic.”

And some more stats:

• Traffic to Onkosh.com is up by 500 percent since the official mid-September launch
• Website ranking service Alexa.com puts current Onkosh.com traffic at levels 130 percent over their three-month average, with the majority of users coming from Egypt (33 percent) and Saudi Arabia (29 percent)

Advertising didn’t appear on Onkosh, but expect that to change. Orascom subsidiary LinkdotNet is gearing up to go the way of all search engines and sell ads and sponsored links.

Bichara says: “In terms of revenue, we will be selling advertising and sponsored links, both on our own site and then also on other sites. The difference is that we might not be selling all of our advertising online like the other multinationals; we have our sales people on the ground doing more face-to-face type of selling. The implementation of the business model will be customized in terms of how to sell, but the advertising model is more or less the same.”

Linkdot net will begin selling ads in early 2008.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 10:57 am and is filed under Mobile Marketing, Mobile Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.