Ayna Corporation

Ayna Corporation is a company that develops Arabic language search engine solutions for the Middle East and North Africa region. Ayna means where in Arabic. The company is best known for its search engine, that operates on Ayna.com, which was launched in 1997 . Ayna Corporation is headquartered in Nashua, New Hampshire, United States, with offices in the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon. .
History
Ayna was founded in 1997 by Adonis El Fakih, the maintainer of the soc.culture.lebanon Usenet newsgroup.
As the list grew larger, El Fakih created a directory site, similar to Yahoo, that concentrated on displaying all the information in the Arabic language. Web browsers, did not interpret or display the Arabic language correctly in browsers, so Ayna resulted to publishing its content in ISO 8859-6 encoding to cater to mac users, Windows-1256 for Arabic windows users and a graphic method developed in house, that enabled the display any Arabic content in the form of GIF images .
To search the growing library of links and descriptions, El Fakih, developed an Arabic search engine online, named nathra , which was inspired by the work of GLIMPSE. Nathra was used used by Ayna and PC Magazine (Arabic Edition)
Ayna and FAST Search
In 2005, Ayna Corporation, signed a license deal with Fast Search to power its search engine with Fast Enterprise Search Platform technology to support the demands for a growing usage base and need for scalability. The Arabic linguistics used in Nathra, were ported to ESP, and in 2009, Ayna re-released its search engine powered by ESP.
By 2009, Ayna dropped ESP after disagreements with Fast, and its service on remedying technical issues that slowed Ayna's indexing capacity, due to technical issues in the ESP product. By that time Microroft had already acquired Fast.
Online Properties
Ayna Corporation operates:
* Ayna.com -- Arabic search engine and web portal
* Beetaqa.com -- Greeting card site (created 1999)
* Heewar.com -- Forum and discussion board (created 1999)
* o9ool.com -- Social website in the Arabic language (acquired 2009)
* ayna.in -- a URL shortening service (created 2010)
* aynaid.com -- an OpenID service (created 2010)

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