Yahoo has announced it is to acquire Maktoob.com, the leading online community in the Arab world with more than 16.5 million unique users. This also means that Yahoo will acquire control of the original Arabic search engine – Al Araby.com. in their release, Yahoo gives various statistics justifying the acquisition. What they don’t say is that Yahoo has also been relatively successful in the region – but didn’t have an operational advertising platform in that part of the world.
The Africa-Middle East region is one of the very fastest growing regions for internet use and with 300 million speakers, Arabic is a very important language looking forwards into the future. Google has also been very keen to capture the Arabic world.
Maktoob’s version of the announcement
Andy Atkins-Kruger
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Samia, the statement about Google being keen to capture the Arabic world is based on comments that have been made by Google executives at various conferences.
Hello !
I really do not understand the statement of : ‘Google has also been very keen to capture the Arabic world’. As a user and a tester of the arabic google search, we can’t really say they have tried very hard to capture the arabic users (interface, aulity of results)….good effort though!
Really looking forward to the great fusion of Maktoob with Yahoo! well done to both!
Thanks