Anyone who isn’t talented when it comes to typing in Arabic and who has attempted to Google Arabic words will be happy to hear about ‘Onkosh’. ‘Onkosh’ is set up by Orascom Telecom and is an Arabic search engine very much like Google, except you can type Arabic words in English letters and the search engine will translate it to its Arabic equivalent and give you relevant results. To those who don’t know ‘Onkosh’ means ‘unearth’ and the name is very relevant as it allows anyone to unearth Arabic webpage, films, images and even blogs.

The great thing about ‘Onkosh’ is that it will take our Arab culture and heritage out there to the world so it can be accessed by anyone anywhere. ‘Onkosh’ has had a beta version out in the open for the past year and I had to try it. I must say that after visiting ‘Onkosh’ I can vouch that the search results are numerous and quite relevant and that it does understand words such as ‘aflam’ (movies) and ‘aghani’ (songs), and even shows you the word written in Arabic letters. Hopefully, after this engine is tweaked it will be better than the current available Arabic search engines.

By Karim