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Halalgoogling: Muslim search engine blocks content forbidden under Islamic law

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Want haram-free Internet surfing?  There’s a search engine for that.

Halalgoogling, which blocks content forbidden by Islamic law, was unveiled on Sunday, according to The Express Tribune.

The Muslim-friendly search engine functions like Google but incorporates a “Haram Filtering System.”

“Halalgoogling has a special filtering system that excludes Haram (forbidden) sites or content from the search results such as pornography, nudity, gay, lesbian, bisexual, gambling, anti-Islamic content or anything else that is Haram according to the Islamic law,” Halagoogling’s blog explains.

According to the site, the “Haram Filtering System” features four components.

General category filtering – Overall search results filtering of different categories

Forbidden sites – Black List of websites that are not allowed to appear on the search results

Link filtering – Removal of only certain  pages/links from a website, blog or forum

Haram Keywords – List of keywords that are not allowed to be searched or to search the entire web (only certain trusted sites).

Searches for terms like “porn,” “Playboy,” “pictures of Mohammad,” and “resurrection of Jesus ” yield no results other than a message reading, “No results found or you have searched Haram (forbidden) content.”

Users are able to retrieve articles from publications such as The Daily Caller – including a recent article featuring a nearly-nude Kate Upton atop a horse.

Halalgoogling explains on its blog that it is still not able to catch all the haram content. Users are encouraged to report the content that slips by the “Haram Filtering System.”

“Despite of our best efforts to make our service as secure as possible from haram content, there is still much work to be done, we still have several milestones to overcome, but with God willing (Insha’Allah) and your help we will make Halalgoogling suitable for every Muslim brother and sister and achieve our common goal,” Halalgoogling’s blog reads. “We apologize for any unintentional mistake that we might have made or could make in the future. We are humans and we make mistakes, only God (Allah SWT) The Almighty and All-knowing does not make mistakes.”

The Express reports that a team of “internet experts” across the globe has been working on the site for years to cater to the needs of Muslims desiring to search without haram content.

The search engine even features a Halalgoogling maps feature.

“Our Mission is to satisfy the internet needs of the Muslim community, so each Muslim can surf the web in the Halal way,” the search engine’s blog reads (emphasis Halagoogling’s).

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