At I’mHalal we’re constantly w0rking on improving our service. In the last year we’ve come very far, going from a very simple search application trying to solve a complex problem, to a mature search engine. A lot of the problems we originally wanted to solve have been solved. For instance, our system is almost flawless in returning Halal results when a users searches for something a little less Halal. That’s unique, and we think that’s great. However, when creating new technology new problems can surface over time. For instance, a lot of our users told us that I’mHalal does work great for global searches, but doesn’t work that good for local searches.

This month, we’ll be upgrading I’mHalal to the next major version: 5. The focus is, as you expect, on local search. In order to make that work as it should, we had to solve a whole lot of new problems: from determining where you are, in a non-invasive way and optimizing our result index to that location. That means a lot of work under the hood, and while I’mHalal 5 isn’t finished yet, I can already tell you (proudly, I must admit) that I’mHalal 5 will behave much more natural, based on your local context. Rest assure though, we’ve made sure that we’re not invading your privacy, like some competitors tend to do.

Along with I’mHalal 5 we’ll also be releasing another big thing: Halal advertising. This is big news for companies, but for I’mHalal users as well. When you’re looking for a particular, commercial product, relevant advertisements will appear. It could be just the thing you were looking for, and since we make sure that every product and company isn’t Haram, you can be sure that the product you were looking for is in sync with the Islamic lifestyle. For publishers it’s great as well, since you’ll be able to target a very particular market very easily. The back-end will give you full control about the budget, your audience and how you want to be found.

When I’mHalal 5 and the Halal advertising platform are live, we’ll release another big thing, this time great stuff for Muslim webmasters. We’ll extend the advertising platform to content. That means that you can very easily make money with your website by displaying our Halal ads. The advantage is obvious: the ads will be relevant to your content at all times, you can be sure that the products and companies behind the ads check out and we save you the trouble of finding advertisers. It doesn’t even matter if you own a big, high traffic website or a small, personal website. I can’t tell you when that’ll go live yet, but keep an eye on this blog for more information!

Keep an eye on our blog and happy searching!
With best regards,

Fabian Tollenaar
Chief Technology Officer

The revolution has turned one year old – I’mHalal went live on 1 September 2009 in the holy month of Ramadan”

As the title of this blog post hints, I’mHalal still is a work in progress but we’re headed into the right direction.

Exactly one year ago I’mHalal was launched as a project to provide the Muslim community a tool to explore the World Wide Web in a completely unique and more effective way. If we look back what we’ve achieved in just twelve months and how significantly I’mHalal has matured from “just a project” into a company, we can’t wait to enter our second year of development to solve the search problem Muslims have.

Even though I’mHalal is primarily a search company, we are driven by a greater cause. Besides being an catalyst of innovation in the MENA and South East Asia region, our main mission; “to make the world a better place” remains one of our core focuses in the coming next years.

“The perfecting of one’s self is the fundamental base of all progress and all moral development.”

We strongly believe in the concept of moral progress. The number of companies with true moral values is decreasing quite significantly. Which is a shame. That’s why I’mHalal offers its expertise and resources to anyone that has a good idea or plan to make the world a better place. Progress doesn’t have to be a slow process.

The overall search problem people from all over the world have hasn’t even been solved for 5%. Search is basically still in its infancy. I’mHalal is the relative small player in the search industry that’s going to solve a huge part of this problem by launching out of the box innovations in the coming next few years.

Stay tuned and Ramadan Mubarak/Kareem!

With best regards,
Reza Sardeha – CEO/Founder of I’mHalal

We are proud to announce we have launched a new initiative to Halalify the Internet!

The web is a great place. It’s an open world where you can easily connect with fellow Muslims, find all information you can possibly desire for free and it’s just simply fun.

There is only one downside though; an increasing number of Haram(explicit or immoral) content is generated on the web every single day. Our goal with Halalify.org is to make Halal content more accessible to the average Internet user by making it a lot easier to find relevant and high quality websites and content without having to bump into explicit websites all the time.

We invite all webmasters that run a website to join our mission to make the Internet a better place by integrating the Halalify button on your website and join the movement by starting the Halalification of the Internet!

You can find more information about the initiative here: http://halalify.org.

Ps: our brothers and sisters in Pakistan need our help. Any donation helps:
Islamic Relief Pakistan Flood Emergency Appeal

Have a blessed Ramadan!
The I’mHalal Team

As you might have noticed, we experienced a few problems today. Some searches resulted in cryptic error messages, and some searches didn’t return the results they should.
We’re not yet sure about the cause of the problems, but we’ve worked hard to make ImHalal function as good as you’re used to. Everything works as it should again, and we’ll dig into the cause the coming days to prevent it from happening ever again!

We apology for any inconveniences the issues may have caused.

With best regards,

Fabian Tollenaar
Chief Technology Officer

We have exciting news to share today. We’ve been working for quite a long while on the world’s first keyword and content based advertising platform for the MENA & MEA region and we’re almost ready to accept private beta testers to our platform!

Our advertising platform is currently being built by one of the inventors of search engine monetization: Ted Huffman and his team. Ted has been directly involved at Overture.com(Now owned by Yahoo), which was the first search engine back in the 90s with an advertising platform. With Ted’s help we’ve been able to develop a unique advertising platform that’s highly optimized for advertisers and publishers located in the MENA and MEA regions.

We understand that every single city in the Middle East is different for example. In Riyad for the mindset of the people is completely different than in Tabuk. That’s why we have optimized our advertising platform per city instead of per country.

Monetization is extremely important for any search engine out there. It allows us to to be able to fund our growth and expand our influence in the regions. That’s why we’re grateful that we’ve received so much support from various organizations, entrepreneurs, developers and of course our users to make it all possible.

Even though we’re not even remotely where we eventually want to be we’re grateful for all the milestones that we’ve already accomplished.

You, our loyal users that have bared with us from the begin when our search service wasn’t as good as it is today have made it all possible. Without you we wouldn’t have enough motivation and especially dedication to work so unbelievably hard on I’mHalal.

Who thought a small player like us had a chance against one of the industry leaders like Yahoo and Google? But look where we are at the moment. We have a great service, a passionate mission to make the Web a better place, a almost virally expanding user base and anytime soon even an industry breaking advertising platform.

Nothing is impossible, that’s the point I’m trying to make here.

Ps: If you are interested to be one of the first companies testing our advertising platform in private beta please contact us.

With best regards,
Reza Sardeha
CEO / CoFounder of ImHalal.com

You’re probably already used to it, but I’d like to talk about some of the latest features on ImHalal. In the past few weeks we’ve worked really hard to implement a reliabel system of Spell Check (of your queries) and Suggestions.

Spell check is intented to help you when you make a Typo while searching. Just beneath the search bar, above the results, the suggested correction appears. Click on it and you’ll be directed to a search page looking for that term.

In the right sidebar we’ve added a few related search suggestions for your search query. This is particularly useful way to navigate to just the website you were looking for. For instance, you’re looking for that one famous wedding planner, but can’t find his website. Since you’ve forgotten his name, you start by searching for ‘marriage’. Our suggestions on the right side help you out from there. Marriage will eventually take you to ‘marriage planner’ and there you’ll find what you were looking for!

One feature which is absent on ImHalal, but heavily requested is SAYT (Suggest As You Type). The reason we haven’t implemented that yet is that we’re still finetuning the technology, to make sure no explicit queries are suggested. Just hang in there, we’ll feature that soon enough!

Happy searching,

Fabian

A couple weeks ago I’mHalal has won the Best Halal Innovation Award at the prestigious World Halal Forum in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia!

We know, we should have posted a blog post regarding this great achievement earlier but as you know and can see from the regular updates on ImHalal.com that we’re working extremely hard on I’mHalal.

Quote from the HalalJournal.com:

“This year’s Best Innovation award went to ImHalal.com, founded by Iranian-Kuwaiti brothers based in The Netherlands. ImHalal.com has revolutionised the search market for Muslims by coming up with the world’s first Islamic orientated search engine that uses a search algorithm to rate the relevancy of websites that is based on the culture, lifestyle and mindset of Muslims. It gives Muslims worldwide the chance to explore the internet without coming across immoral or pornographic content. ImHalal.com has been hailed a success after it attracted more than 3 million visitors in its first month of operation.”

I’mHalal – Best Halal Innovation Award

With best regards,
The I’mHalal Team!

As some of you might noticed, we launched public beta with a language select button, but it disappeared a few days later. We had some problems related to Internet Explorer, and decided to redesign the language select button.

That button looks like something small and unimportant at first, but we noticed that the change of one little button can make a lot of difference, especially when it involves an important feature like different languages.

We faced a particular hard problem: somebody who doesn’t speak English (the default language) might not know the meaning of “Select your language”, and thus he or she won’t know how to change the language. To solve it we came up with a very elegant solution (we think), by just showing a little flag in the footer. Anybody understands the link between language and a flag, and it isn’t “in the way” like a big fat button would be. After clicking on the flag a beautiful dialog pops up, and you’ll be able to select one of the five initial languages.

If your language isn’t there, but you’d love it to be there, just let us know via feedback@imhalal.com. We’ll slowly be adding more languages, but these are the most important we figured. By the way, if you find an error in one of the translations, please let us know as well!

With best regards,

Fabian
CTO at I’mHalal.com

Dear I’mHalal Beta Users!

I hope you all are well. By now you’ve probably already have been able to play around with the latest I’mHalal version and we’re sure you’re already loving it!

But we’re not there yet. This is just the start. The coming few days we’ll launch step by step new features to make it easier for you to explore the world wide web as accurately possible.

A part of our team is currently in Malaysia attending the World Halal Forum and our CEO – Reza Sardeha will be speaking at the event about New Media.

If you’re attending the event just contact us contact@imhalal.com to meet!

Since we’re still Beta testing our search service, Feedback remains extremely important to us. If you think we should improve something or that a feature you really want is missing just contact us at feedback@imhalal.com.

With best regards,
The I’mHalal Team!

As you might have noticed, we’ve updated our private beta login page. Probably the most eye-catching item is the big countdown. But; what exactly are we counting down to?

As Reza already posted earlier, we’re launching I’mHalal in public beta in just a few days. To be exact, ImHalal.com will be available to the public from the 10th of June, midnight (GMT+1). We’re working really hard to tie up the latest loose ends and testing our various interfaces with our private beta users.

Yes, I’mHalal will be available in three different versions. First of all, we’ll be releasing a greatly improved upgrade of our ‘regular’ layout. We’ve listened to our private beta users (many thanks for that!) and we’ve worked really hard to upgrade the interface based on their feedback. Next to that, we’ll be releasing a ‘light’ version. It’s a more basic interface, for everybody on dial-up connections. This version is optimized for speed.

The third version is really interesting. We’re going mobile! We’ve optimized our technology for use over (slow) mobile connections, and we have spend a lot of time finding the right balance between lightweight, featured and useable (on small screens, FT) – and I think we’ve found it. You’ll love it!

I don’t want to spoil the surprise by posting screenshots, so please hang on to the 10th. Just keep an eye on the countdown!

How can you help us? Simply by spreading the word! Only with your help and support we’ll be able to shake-up the online landscape by representing and promoting the Islamic identity on the world wide web.

With best regards,
The I’mHalal Team!