THE internet is about to become a little more Arabic friendly, with plans to create the first dedicated Arabic-language search engine. Its inventors hope it will open up the internet to hundreds of millions of native Arabic speakers and help boost the number of web pages written in Arabic.

Seekport, a search engine firm in Munich, Germany, unveiled its plans for the search engine last week in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The search engine, to be called Sawafi, will be launched late this year and will challenge the rudimentary Arabic search facilities offered by Google, MSN and Yahoo.

Seventy per cent of the material on the internet is written in English, a language understood by only about one-third of Arab internet users. About 100 million web pages are written in Arabic, 0.2 per cent of the total posted worldwide.