Potential Muslim internet users who might previously have avoided the internet for some of its less wholesome content, now have a safe option in the new search engine Imhalal.com

“Our main goal is to become the number one website in every Muslim home.” Reza Sardeha, Founder of ImHalal.com, told The Media Line.

While internet use has increased steadily in the Middle East and North Africa over the last few of years, many potential users have stayed away due to religious concerns over the content. The search engine will not return results considered haram, forbidden, and only show results that are demand halal, approved, under Muslim religious law.

“The idea grew from a couple of friends and I, who all use Yahoo! and Google search engines, and we kept bumping into explicit content,” Sardeha said.

“I came up with the idea of launching a search engine specifically designed for Muslims where you can search websites without inadvertently coming across content that would be haram,” he said

“First of all, we have blocked all sexually explicit content. We are also in talks with Imams [Muslim scholars] to determine what might be considered haram and therefore be blocked.”

The searing filter is static but is made up of three different layers which serve to give the user as good an engine as possible.

“Imhalal is not a dictatorial or censorship website, we want people to be able to continue their online search,” commented Sardeha.

“If you type in a search term that is level one haram or level two haram, the user still has the opportunity to continue if he is really sure that the search term will fetch a halal result. But if the result is three out of three then no results will be fetched by Imhalal.com,” Sardeha explained.

“We use a two layer system, first of all the search engine analyses the content fetched by Imhalal.com and all websites that contain explicit material will be filtered out. Some websites will still be fetched and there the secondary, more aggressive and progressive filter kicks in and that is when you will see the haram level.” He continued.

Sardeha has high hopes and more plans for the future. “In one month’s time we hope to add Islamic widgets such as prayer time so that you can easily find out when to pray or when you come to the website you will see a quote from the Qur’an. We are marketing Imhalal as a social homepage for Muslim households” He said.

A quick search on Imhalal.com revealed that many major western news sites have been cleared as well as popular social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

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TinEye uses “sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms” to find any instance of an image anywhere on the Internet. As its creators explain it, the service creates “a compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint,’” then compares “its fingerprint to the fingerprint of every single other image in the TinEye search index.”

A complex system, but put simply: You give it an image and it’ll show you who else has it.

Here’s what happens: You sign up for a free account and wait a few minutes for a confirmation e-mail. Then, you login, upload an image or input an image URL — and within seconds, TinEye will show you every place the same image is being used. Still in beta, the service is still somewhat limited, though already fairly impressive: The database is at just over 700 million images and is growing by the day as its spiders continue to crawl the Web for images.

I first tried a search for The Inquisitr logo, seen in the banner at the top of this site. TinEye says no one else is using it. Next, I tried one certain to deliver plenty of offenders: the Miley Cyrus Vanity Fair photo. Sure enough, TinEye found a few dozen sites that’d lifted the picture and published it themselves.

Some other hot searches TinEye points out include the Uncle Sam “I Want You” poster, the Mona Lisa, the U.S. dollar bill, and the Hello Kitty character.

Canada-based Idee is behind this new startup. The company focuses on image identification software and has created a few other products utilizing similar concepts. Its founders say their technology can handle low-resolution or grainy images and still be able to recognize them.

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Google Fellow Amit Singhal posted a detailed blog discussing some common questions about the mysterious process, such as whether Google ever manually edits results:

“Let me just answer that with our third philosophy: no manual intervention. In our view, the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms. The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us.”

Singhal doesn’t go into any explanation of the technologies or the algorithms driving the ranking. He does say, however, that those topics will come up in a future posting.

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