Parsijoo

» see parsijoo.ir as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The research started in 2005 and took three years. A first version went out in 2010 covering about a million Persian pages, which was a small index even then, and the company behind it was Web Pardazan Novin Parsijoo. By its fifth generation Parsijoo claimed more than 1.5 billion pages and hung fifteen-odd services off the search box: news, maps, video, translation, a marketplace, a jobs board, prayer times, weather.

The search box was the smaller half of the project. Iran had been building toward a National Information Network, a domestic layer of the internet meant to keep Iranian traffic on Iranian servers and Iranian users inside a perimeter the state could see. Such a thing needs a search engine, because a country cannot route around Google while its people are still using Google. In May 2015 the Telecommunication Ministry presented Parsijoo publicly as one of the national search engines, alongside a budget report that set aside roughly $27 million for domestic telecom research and around $40 million for the state's information technology obligations.

Persian search was never going to reach me, and the reason is language before anything else. A search engine is the one product where the language is the whole of it. What did carry across the border was the argument, because Turkey has been having its own version of the conversation about a sovereign internet for as long as I have been on one.

~ the record ~

~ what the results page actually did ~

The Center for Human Rights in Iran tested it the same month it was unveiled. Typing the name Mir Hossein Mousavi, the Green Movement leader then under house arrest, returned state material and no other kind. Searching for the jailed student activist Bahareh Hedayat, or for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, returned an empty results page in both cases.

CHRI's finding was that the ordering tracked the government's political sensitivities, which is a different operating principle from the one Google and Yahoo ran on. Parsijoo's leadership denied the censorship charge and argued that the site gave users more privacy than Google did, a claim that was narrowly true about advertising data and silent on everything CHRI had actually tested.

~ what the money bought ~

It bought about six years of being second place at home. In 2016 Parsijoo was handling roughly 600,000 hits and 120,000 searches a day, which made it the most used Iranian search engine and left it several orders of magnitude behind the American one it was built to replace. Yooz, the other state-backed attempt, went up in 2015 claiming a billion indexed pages and died in 2021. Persian tech press later went back over the whole program and found much the same ending everywhere: large sums spent copying Google, and almost nothing still running.

Funding was cut roughly eighteen months before the Persian tech press got around to reporting it. Parsijoo kept serving after that. The index stopped refreshing.

~ the address stops answering ~

Persian Wikipedia puts the last working day at the beginning of Mordad 1401, the last week of July 2022. English Wikipedia marks it defunct by that October. The Wayback Machine's last real capture of the homepage is from April 2021, which fits a site that had already stopped changing. There was no announcement and no redirect to a successor.

Type parsijoo.ir now and you get a 302 to a domain broker. The recommendation you will find in open-source-intelligence tool lists is to strike Parsijoo out and use Gerdoo or Zarebin instead, which is the most honest epitaph a search engine can get: somebody updating a list.

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