Onkosh

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

~ the obituary ~

Onkosh opened in September 2007, paid for by Orascom Telecom and credited to Heba Matta. The problem it was built against was a real one: there was an enormous amount of Arabic on the web and the search engines of the day were poor at reaching it. Arabic builds its words out of three-letter roots with prefixes and suffixes stacked around them, and it writes the vowels optionally or not at all. Any given name has several defensible spellings. An index that matches strings will miss most of that.

So Onkosh did natural language processing on the query before it went looking, and it put that work behind seven separate indexes. There was web search over Arabic with some English and French mixed in, image search built on top of Picsearch, blog search across Arabic and Arab-related blogs with a section for whatever videos bloggers were passing around, file search for music and ringtones, forum search, a news aggregator pulling the main Arabic outlets, and a directory running off the Arabic Open Directory. The forum index was the shrewd one, since a large share of the Arabic web in 2007 lived inside phpBB installations that general search handled badly. There was a version for phones at onkosh.mobi, which made sense when the parent company sold phone service for a living.

It lasted two years and seven months. The money behind it was corporate money with a revenue expectation attached. When the revenue failed to turn up, Orascom stopped paying.

~ the case file ~

~ bel-3araby ~

The feature worth remembering was called Bel-3araby, and the name demonstrates it. Arabic speakers typing on keyboards with no Arabic layout had already invented their own transliteration, substituting digits for the letters with no Latin equivalent, so a 3 carries ع and a 7 carries ح on the strength of the shapes looking alike. This was never standardized and nobody taught it. It spread through chat windows and SMS.

Onkosh took that as input and searched the Arabic web with it, which meant somebody at an Egyptian telecom had looked at how people were actually typing rather than at how they ought to. For users who had an Arabic layout in their head but not under their fingers, the site also put a clickable keyboard on the page. The transliteration was patented, and the launch announcement claimed nobody had done it on the web before.

Khaled Bichara, who sat on the holding company's board, was quoted in the launch announcement explaining why the field was empty. Building a search engine was hard enough on its own, he said, and once you add a system that "speaks and understands the complexities of the Arabic language and can transliterate English words into their equivalent Arabic words, it becomes clear why other global and local players have not undertaken this mission yet." A beta had already been running for about a year by then.

~ the jpeg goodbye ~

The wind-down shows up in the archive before any announcement does. From 15 December 2009 the homepage stopped being a search box and started redirecting into the Arabic news section at /news/ar/. A company does that once it has worked out which room is still worth heating. That redirect was still running on 11 April 2010. Seventeen days later the root of the site was 114 bytes of HTML, and all it contained was one centered image.

The image is 863 by 358 pixels and it is the entire farewell. On the left is the wordmark, with a magnifying glass serving as the O and أنكش written underneath. On the right, in plain black text, it opens: "Goodbye. Thanks for all the support over the past few years." What follows is four lines of valediction broken like verse, starting "We dreamed about enhancing the online Arabic content," with the capitalization slipping mid-sentence the way it does when somebody writes a thing once and ships it without a second reading. It closes on "Thank you for sharing the journey with us," and then invites comments and ideas at [email protected], an address belonging to Link Development, the software house that had actually built the thing. It stayed up that way for at least two more years.

I had to download the picture to read the sentence, because there was no text on the page to read. That is a particular way for a search company to leave: everything it said on its way out is invisible to the kind of index it had spent those years building. The Arabic web sits one border away from where I live and is shut to me without the script, so I read this one in English, off a launch announcement and a picture.

~ what the encyclopedia got wrong ~

Wikipedia gives the closure as 11 August 2010 and carries no citation for it; every reference on that page is launch coverage from 2007. The archive puts it nearly four months earlier, with a working redirect on 11 April 2010 and the goodbye image in place by 28 April, so this grave dates it to that April instead. Today onkosh.com serves a website-builder template under the old name, carrying a stock tagline about shopping smart and not one product.

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