I found a new service on Google called Ejabat, Ejabat is an Arabic word and it means answers. The service is on http://ejabat.google.com but it's only offered in Arabic. I've read a small introduction about it and it says it's a service which aims to help the Arab users get answers to their questions from other users, it uses a reputation system for users to determine the quality of answers.

----------- PRESS RELEASE ----------------
Have a Question? Google Ejabat May have the Answer
Google Launches – Ejabat a Question and Answer product to help users share information

How do you cure a stomach ache? What is the best way to make macaroni? What is the best hotel for beach access in Dubai? What airline should I fly to go from Riyadh to Beirut? – Questions such as these are ones that users have on a daily basis and the place they turn to is the internet. Today with the launch of Google Ejabat or إجابات ('answers' in Arabic) users can start answering these questions for each other.

Google Ejabat or إجابات, is a tool which allows users to post and answer each others questions in Arabic. This tool is purely based on user generated content. Given that less than 1% of content online is in Arabic users often are unable to find the same information that they would if they were searching in other languages such as English. However as more users in MENA are turning to the internet to find information, the Google Arabia team focused on launching products that empower Arabic speaking users to create more online content in their language. Google Ejabat is the latest effort to enrich the Arabic web.

"In our effort to understand the needs of the market we found out that Arabic users ask Google a tremendous number of questions every day however a lot of these remain unanswered due to the lack of Arabic content online. We recognize that users are the best at answering each others's questions within a community and this product is the prefect way to be able to share and contribute information" said Wael Ghonim, Regional Product & Marketing Manager MENA.

Recognizing the online content issue in Arabic, Google launched Ejabat in Arabic before English in order to address the needs of the market specifically. Ahmad Hamzawi, Head of Engineering MENA, further commented "The Google Arabia team is committed to enhancing the user experience for Arab speakers. We work on developing and launching products that will continue to enrich Arabic content online with Ejabat as the latest step in our ambitious plans."

Over the last two years Google has been busy launching other tools such as Ejabat that are useful for the Arabic market such as Google Translation Toolkit and Blogger.


To start contributing questions and answering questions go to ejabat.google.com

why is there a similar service for different places (russia) under different names. this is silly, google

I noticed that, Google Ejabat was launched on September 9.

And nobody said anything?

Nope :-)

Yes, on Twitter ;) http://twitter.com/Zorgloob/statuses/4340936243 (in French)

And Google has already announced it officially http://google-arabia.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-google-google.html

Blogoscoped, i'm disappointed. It should've been reported here! xD

There is a lot of facts unreported on this forum – I try to put them all on Twitter, but it's in French unfortunately. Perhaps they are not reported here because they don't look interesting for us...

Yep, it uses exactly the same service code ("cf") as the Russian Knowledge Search (http://otvety.google.ru/otvety) and the Chinese Wenda site powered by Tianya.cn (http://wenda.tianya.cn/wenda/).

Do you know if these services are popular in their countries?

Same here, most of the things I put on Twitter to, but thats in Dutch.

TOMHTML Here in Egypt I don't think much people know about it, I found it as an AD on another site of an Egyptian news paper.