It was only a matter of time.
Pakistan IT experts have launched a new Muslim search engine that blocks forbidden content as per Islamic law to allow Muslims a safe surfing on the internet.
“The search engine Halalgoogling is an alternative for the existing search engines that don’t satisfy the needs of the Muslims,” a statement on the blog says.
“Halalgoogling is designed to respect the Muslim Culture.”
The blog noted that that ‘Halalgoogling’ gives results from leading search engines such as Google and Bing.
Seeking to satisfy the needs of the Muslim users, the search engine blocks web content deemed “haram” or forbidden in Islam by using its own custom filters.
Dubbed the “Haram Filtering System,” it claims to block content based on general category filtering and forbidden sites on a “black list.”
It also sifts through links and a list of “haram keywords,” which cannot be used to search on the website.
Searches for terms like “porn,” “Playboy,” “pictures of Mohammad,” and “resurrection of Jesus ” yield no results other than a message reading, “No results found or you have searched Haram (forbidden) content.”
“Halalgoogling has a special filtering system that excludes Haram (forbidden) sites or content from the search results such as pornography, nudity, gay, lesbian, bisexual, gambling, anti-Islamic content or anything else that is Haram according to the Islamic law,” the blog says.
According to the site, the “Haram Filtering System” features four components.
General category filtering – Overall search results filtering of different categories
Forbidden sites – Black List of websites that are not allowed to appear on the search results
Link filtering – Removal of only certain pages/links from a website, blog or forum
Haram Keywords – List of keywords that are not allowed to be searched or to search the entire web (only certain trusted sites).
Required Development
Despite its filters, Halalgoogling admits that some haram content still escapes the filter.
“Despite of our best efforts to make our service as secure as possible from haram content, there is still much work to be done, we still have several milestones to overcome,” a statement on the blog says.
“We apologize for any unintentional mistake that we might have made or could make in the future.”
I wonder if the following constitute “unintentional mistakes”:
