Microsoft Fast Questioned by Ayna
January 27, 2010
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to a news story in Ayna. The headline was “Ayna Drops Fast Search Engine.” I have no way of knowing if the write up is balanced, but I want to capture the item so it doesn’t get away from me. According to the write up:
Ayna’s CEO, Adonis El Fakih, remarks “FAST solutions, sales, and support are not in sync with the changing tides or the available search choices out there, and wanted to keep the status quo, instead of stepping up to the plate and deliver a competitive product.” Ayna’s decision to drop FAST from its repertoire of technologies, came after months of deliberation with account managers and support services, which exposed the short comings of the platform and business attitude towards competing in the search space. Mr. El Fakih continued to say “…it is lamentable to loose an important investment in our core services, however we had no choice but to cut our loss and move on.”
Ayna is a search system serving users and customers in the Middle East. Among its services are Web indexing and mapping. You can access the Ayna service in English here. The French version is here. The main site is at http://www.ayna.com/index.ar.html.
Stephen E Arnold, January 27, 2010
Tess licked me this morning but I wrote this news item as a way to make a note for myself. I will report this bibliographic intent to the Library of Congress.
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3 Responses to “Microsoft Fast Questioned by Ayna”
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This doesn’t surprise me; Arabic users are not at all well served by search technology which has on the whole been developed in the West. There are few options available for text pre-processing such as stemming (Arabic words don’t just have suffixes to strip, but also prefixes and even infixes) although there are some promising projects. Some Arabic words have many synonyms (I seem to remember someone telling me there are 40 different ways to refer to the city ‘Cairo’).
There’s obviously been significant investment in understanding, processing and indexing Arabic text over the last decade, for geopolitical reasons, but it’s hard to know when these might become economic for Arabic sites to deploy. There are also issues of volume, where some Arabic aggregators are compiling vast collections of content, but are unable to afford commercial search technology that scales to this level. I wouldn’t be surprised if Ayna have considered an open-source alternative.
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