Social Media Marketing

Ayna means Where in the Arabic language, and it is also the name of an Arabic language search engine that was launched April 15th, 1997 (source:Whois database). The site started with an Internet directory service published in Arabic with the following encodings: CP1256, ISO_8859-6, and an image format. By 2002, the company adopted UTF-8 as its main Arabic encoding format.

In the Arabic search field, Ayna relied on an in-house software called at that time "nathra". Nathra, written in Perl, allowed Ayna to index and search Arabic content in the supported Arabic encodings. Nathra continued to be in use by Ayna until 2005, after which it migrated to a FAST search engine solution, after porting the Arabic linguistics to the new platform.