ImHalal

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

~ the obit ~

A search box that asks you to reconsider your question was never going to be my search box. That is not a verdict on ImHalal, it is a statement about what I wanted from a search engine in 2009, which was everything the index had with no opinion attached to it.

It launched on 1 September 2009 from the Netherlands. Reza Sardeha built it after noticing that he and his friends kept landing on pornography while searching for ordinary things, which is a real complaint about the 2009 web and not a religious one. The product he shipped was religious, though. Every result set came back with a haram rating, and the rating governed what you were allowed to see.

The press found it within days. ABC News ran it, Foreign Policy ran it, and by the end of the first month more than four hundred thousand people had tried it. Some of that was Muslim users who had wanted exactly this. A lot of it was western journalists poking the machine to see what it would refuse.

Turkey never really took it up. In 2009 Turkish web users were on Google like everyone else, and the country's own arguments about what should be visible online were happening at the government level rather than in a search box you could choose. ImHalal was aimed at the Gulf and the wider Middle East, with an English interface, which is a different audience from the one I was in.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the three levels ~

The rating ran from one to three. A one or a two got you a warning screen telling you that your search might return haram material, and you could click past it. A three got nothing: searches for words like porn were blocked outright, with no way through.

The interesting part was where the line fell. Beer and pork were rated one, and the stated reason was that you cannot consume either of them over an internet connection, so reading about them was not itself the sin. That is an actual piece of reasoning about what a medium can and cannot deliver, applied to a filter. Most content filters of that era were keyword blacklists with nothing behind them.

~ what the press did with it ~

Coverage split along a line you could see coming. One half treated it as a service story: here is a tool that a large group of people had asked for and nobody had built. The other half treated it as censorship with a friendly interface, and tested it by searching for the most inflammatory thing they could think of, then writing down what happened.

Both readings missed that the filter was opt-in. Nobody was routed to ImHalal by their government or their ISP. You went there because you wanted the filter, which makes it closer to a parental control setting you apply to yourself than to a national block. There is a longer argument about whether a filter you choose stays a choice once your community expects you to use it, and that argument is not settled anywhere.

~ where the money was supposed to come from ~

Advertising, is the answer, and it never showed up at the scale required. A search engine is expensive in a way that is invisible from the front: you are either running your own crawl and index, which costs real machines, or you are paying somebody else for results and then throwing away the ones your filter dislikes. Either way the traffic has to convert.

Four hundred thousand curious visitors in a launch month is a press number, not a business. The company talked about opening part of its code through an API and letting others build on the rating, which would have been the sensible move if there had been time. By late 2011 the funding was gone and the search service went off. What remained was a name that a lot of people remembered hearing about once and nobody remembered using twice.

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