Ajeeb.com

» see ajeeb.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Turkish never had an Ajeeb. The web I got on in 1998 was in English, the documentation was in English, and the only answer available to me was to get better at English, which is what happened and which I am still living off. Arabic had roughly the same problem at roughly the same scale and got an actual product built for it.

Ajeeb.com opened in November 2000, run by Sakhr Software, a Kuwaiti company founded in 1982 by Mohammed Al-Sharekh that had spent the eighties selling Arabic-capable home computers and the nineties building Arabic language technology after it moved to Cairo. Machine translation for Arabic is a much harder problem than machine translation for French, and Sakhr had been at it long enough to have something that worked.

The core service was one field on one page. You gave it an English URL and it gave you the page back in Arabic, claiming under four seconds on a 56 kilobit modem and about seventy percent accuracy. Seventy percent is not good. Seventy percent is enormously better than zero, which is what an Arabic-only reader had before it, and the traffic reflected that: by its first birthday the portal was reporting more than forty million page views a month, which was a regional record at the time.

On 7 October 2001 it added the direction nobody had bothered with, Arabic into English, so that the traffic could go both ways. Around it grew the rest of a portal: a directory called Al-Dalil listing more than 35,000 regional sites, dictionaries, and webmail with the language tools built into it.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was actually for ~

Every regional portal of that era claimed to be a gateway, and nearly all of them meant a homepage with links on it. Ajeeb meant something narrower and more useful. The gateway was the translator, and the portal was the packaging around it.

That is a real business as long as translation is difficult and expensive to run. Sakhr owned the engine, and the engine was the product, and the fact that it sat behind a free consumer site was a way of demonstrating it to the governments and ministries who were the actual customers. The company sold Arabic localization to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Oman, and it kept doing that long after the portal stopped mattering.

~ how it actually ended ~

Nothing dramatic happened. Translation stopped being a place you went and became a button on a page you were already on, first in the search results and then inside the browser, and it cost nothing because it was subsidized by advertising somewhere else. A portal whose reason to exist is a free service that Google now performs on every page in the world does not get killed, it gets skipped.

The archive shows the shape of that. Captures of ajeeb.com run steadily through the 2000s, thin out after 2012, and stop on 17 February 2014. When something looks at the address again in 2021 there is a 404 behind it. Today the domain does not resolve at all. There was no closing note, no farewell page, no press release, which is what happens when a site stops being maintained rather than being shut down. Sakhr Software is still trading, still doing Arabic language technology, and it bought a Silicon Valley speech company in 2009 to get into mobile. The portal is the part that did not survive.

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