‘Halal’ search engine for Muslims

[Naveed Yaseen]

LAHORE: A Dutch company has launched a new search engine that aims to protect Muslims from accidentally bumping into explicit material while surfing the Web, Times of India said on Friday. Named ImHalal.com, or “I am Halal”, the search engine is the world’s first tailor made for Muslim users. Reza Sardeha, founder of AZS Media Group, which runs the search engine, was quoted by the paper as saying that the idea grew after his friends complained of bumping into sexually explicit content when using search engines such as Yahoo or Google. The site’s filter examines the user’s search terms and the websites that are returned, trawling for a ‘non-halal list’ of words that may indicate forbidden fruit. On the site, sex-related terms such as gay and lesbian or ‘sexy’ merit a haram level of three, the highest score on the list. But ‘beer’ and ‘pork’ only merit a score of one, while ‘drugs’ comes up as a level two. Sardeha said the company was now in talks with clerics to determine what else might be considered illegal in Islam so that it could be blocked. daily times monitor

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp...2009_pg7_4