Parsijoo, the local search engine in Iran, has added a new translation service to its official website. Currently, this service is in its beta testing phase. At this moment, English to Persian, Persian to English and Pinglish to Persian translations are supported in this platform. According to the announcement made by Parsijoo’s managers, this service has been made by local engineers, and it’s not utilizing third party APIs in defiance of rumors.
This project is running jointly by Shahrood University and Iran’s Ministry of Science, Research and Technology. Iranian government has supported this project financially to cope with the penetration of Google, giant search engine, in Iran’s society. According to Alexa ranking system, 10% of Parsijoo’s traffic is coming directly from Google, its main competitor.
“Destroying the dominance of Western IT companies in Iran’s Web space is our most important goal in the current conditions.” Iran’s IT minister addressed media before.
During the recent years, the local government has invested much money to back Iran-based companies and startups to establish their business models. However, this project has not introduced any notable result until now.
Base on official statistics, Iran has more than 45 million Internet users. At the same time, the country suffers from the large number of low quality websites which don’t offer any value to their readers. This has even made local analysts to criticize the behavior of Iranian users in famous social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.