Few months after the launch of Jewish search engine Koogle (see my post about Koogle Search Engine),  ImHalal has shown-up. This new search engine has been deisgned with the Muslim community in mind, with specific filters on the search results. This filter makes sure that the result is acceptable to be view ed by a Muslim. For example the keyword ‘beer’ will return a warning message.

Muslim Search Engine

It is the second religious search engine in least that 3 months and proves that people are always looking for community specific tools online. Also this search engine solves a few legal issues for countries like India, South Arabia, ect.

On the technologies side of it, this search engine proposes some interesting results and seem to be pretty relevant.

It is a pretty good job done by ImHalal.

Oparla is the name of the new British search engine which gives you money for your search.

The principle is pretty simple, you need to register, execute a search and every day Oparla picks a winner. One thousand pounds is the prize! Good idea, but who is going to use this search engine over and over only for the chance of winning a prize?

So let see what this ‘new’ search engine can do. First, Oparla looks pretty much like Google before the search, simple with a clear call to action (only one button ‘search’)

Oparla

The Oparla result page on the default view is very different from the classic Google/Yahoo appearance. It is a list of the results with three columns, title, summary and URL. To be honest this list of websites doesn’t look very pretty, but at least the search result page is pretty quick to load.  At anytime you can switch to the classic view.

Oparla

The results of the search are pretty good for a ‘small’ search engine although occasionally the search engine doesn’t  find the most relevant result (e.g.: selected the LinkedIn directory page instead of my actual profile page when I entered my name).

In conclusion, this search engine who (can) give you money is a pretty good marketing idea but after few days I am not sure that it will be enough to keep people using Oparla. Also, I didn’t see any major benefit compared to Yahoo or Google. To be honest with you, I really don’t believe that this search engine will do well… Anyway the official launch is the 14th of April.

Good luck Oparla