"We understand the need to provide our users with the most relevant news for their region," says William Kanaan, Middle East and North Africa Product Manager on the Google News blog. "Like all Google News editions, our computer-generated Arabic editions aggregate headlines from thousands of news outlets around the world, group similar stories together and link directly to the original sources that publish these stories."

"This enables users to search for topics they’re interested in, and read a wide variety of perspectives from different sources," he adds. "It also enables publishers to expand their reach to a wider audience, thus increasing traffic to their site."

Speaking of that, WebProNews has posted a collection of tips for Google News SEO to help publishers rank higher in news searches. These tips mostly come right from Google, though there are some factors from a recent Google Patent and links to some useful tips from Search Engine Strategies San Jose.

Google’s not the only one expanding its Arabic offerings. Just last week, Yahoo announced its intent to acquire Maktoob.com, an Arab portal that reaches one in every three people online in its region. On top of that, Yahoo discussed plans to launch Arabic versions of Yahoo Mail, Messenger, Search, and the Yahoo home page, followed by local versions of its News, Sports, and Finance properties.
 

"This deal is part of Yahoo!’s broader strategy to grow our international business, particularly in emerging markets," says Yahoo Senior Vice President, Emerging Markets Keith Nilsson. "In many countries, vast populations — and advertisers — are just starting to come online. The potential is tremendous. Yahoo! has a large and growing audience in these markets today, and our acquisition of Maktoob represents the kind of investment we’re making to cater to the needs of these promising regions."

Yahoo says it will join forces with Maktoob’s team to create locally relevant content, sevices, and programming. Still, the company intends to implement the Yahoo formula in the region, with locally-based editorial teams. Yahoo plans on launching Arabic versions of Yahoo Mail, Messenger, Search, and the Yahoo home page, followed by local versions of its News, Sports, and Finance properties.

"Arabs are vastly underserved by today’s Internet offerings," says Nilsson. "The World Bank estimates that there are 320 million Arabic speakers around the globe, yet less than one per cent of online content is written in their language (despite a vibrant Arabic blogosphere). We have a big opportunity to meet this growing demand, and we think Yahoo!, building on Maktoob’s local expertise, brings the scale and heft to draw many more people online in the region –- and we plan to give them compelling reasons to log on."

Financial terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed. However, Yahoo has set up an information site about the deal, which will be updated accordingly.

Arabic, according to the Ethnologue, is the fourth-most common language with around 206 million speakers (in 1999).  Toss in another 7 million or so individuals who speak Hebrew, and you’ll see that Facebook accomplished something very important here.

 

It also accomplished something difficult.  On the Facebook Blog, Ghassan Haddad pointed out that Arabic and Hebrew are written right-to-left, and "[t]he mix of characters between languages written in different directions makes it difficult at times for Web applications to determine the correct direction in which to display the language.  Design is another challenge, since a Web page laid out from right to left looks like a mirror image of an equivalent English page.  All components on the page must be changed . . ."

And here’s another curveball: "both Arabic and Hebrew are highly inflectional languages.  In English, verbs do not change based on the gender of the person described, whereas in Arabic and Hebrew, two words with the same meaning are used differently based on whether a person is male or female.  In order to deal with this issue, our developers built a feature we call dynamic explosion, which detects a person’s gender and selects the matching translation."

Anyway, the addition of Arabic and Hebrew brings Facebook’s language total to exactly 40.  Over 60 more are in development.

We’ve all heard about Google’s struggles in China, and the company’s had problems in other regions, too.  But the Middle East and North Africa almost never get mentioned, and on the Official Google Blog, Ahmad Hamzawi explains, "The reality is that in many countries across Middle East and North Africa (MENA) there is only single-digit Internet penetration rate."

So Google’s just going to woo this population from the ground up.  Hamzawi continues, "As more Arabic speaking people come online — the vast majority via mobile phones — our team wants to help provide effective and useful products in their native language. . . .  We want to build tools to make content creation even easier for our Arabic-speaking users, encouraging them to connect, share and interact with each other, and with other users around the world."

This represents a huge opportunity for growth, and a particularly important one since Google’s sort of maxing out its popularity in many other areas.  As an added bonus: Google may be able to apply whatever it learns about the MENA region’s mobile market to the same sector in English-speaking countries.

Look for a lot of developments in Arabic, then, as it’s not every job opening at Google that becomes the focus of a 900-word blog entry.