Yooz

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

~ the obit ~

Iran's communications ministry unveiled Yooz on 16 February 2015, and the pitch was sovereignty. Sanctions had made the country's access to foreign technology unreliable, so Iran would index the Persian web itself rather than route every question through American servers. The name means cheetah. The build went to a private firm, Dadeh Pardazan Shid Andish, working under the government's Information Technology Organization, and the project was later handed to a group at Imam Hussein University.

The launch figures were enormous and mostly unverifiable. The ministry said the engine could support a billion Persian websites and had already indexed more than a billion pages. The usage numbers that anybody could actually check came in at roughly 100,000 hits a day from about 60,000 people, in a country whose users kept reaching for google.com regardless of what was available at home.

Iran borders Turkey, and I have never once needed a Persian-language search index. That is the honest shape of my distance here. It is not a decade or an ocean, just a language and a policy. Turkey never attempted a national search engine of its own; state control over the Turkish internet arrived later and took the form of blocking foreign sites rather than replacing them.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually returned ~

In May 2015 a research group ran a fixed set of queries against Yooz and the other Iranian engines and published what came back. Searches for BBC Persian pointed at persianbbc.ir, a substitute site standing in for the real one. Facebook and Twitter queries were bounced toward Iranian clones, and results about Baha'is came back uniformly hostile, using the state's preferred phrasing for the faith.

The filtering was leaky, which was its own kind of problem for the people running it. Yooz returned VPN tutorials much as Google did. At one point it printed a Wikipedia-sourced link to the actual facebook.com directly above its own list of approved substitutes.

~ the money ~

At least seven billion tomans went into development and launch, and that number covers 2015 alone. The subsidy kept arriving for years after. In 2019 the deputy communications minister, Amir Nazemi, said out loud that a decision on continuing would have to come from other agencies, and added that the thing might have gone better in private hands with steady funding instead of a permanent drip of state money. That is roughly what a minister says about a product he has stopped defending.

~ how it ended ~

There was no announcement. In October 2020 the homepage was rebuilt as a stripped version of itself, losing the news aggregator and the blog reader, keeping only the search tabs. The last capture that serves a working page is 15 April 2021. Ten days after that the address answers 502, and from then on it answers 502 or nothing.

Digiato reported on 2 June 2021 that the domestic search engine had gone inactive, and filed the story under the end of a project measured in billions. By October 2023 yooz.ir was serving the default Apache welcome page of a freshly installed Ubuntu box. Today the domain does not resolve.

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