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Top1. Introduction
Information retrieval from Islamic scriptures has increased greatly in recent years (Nisha et al., 2014). Neither Islamic search engines nor Quran-related information on the Web has been modified to accommodate the popularity of religion and the domination of the Internet. That means, in recent years, Islamic search engines have not worked well. Moreover, the dominating terms of authentic Islamic searchers are not available, because they rely on the traditional information retrieval and the so-called ‘custom search’ practise. The need to search the internet safely has generated applications to address numerous issues around the world; child safe content such as Yahooligans (now Yahoo! Kids) and Google SafeSearch are two examples that portray the extent of this market. Considering that approximately 1.5 billion Muslims in the world are concerned about the type of content provided to their children, and themselves, the need for an effective Islam-aware search application is critical. Imhalal and Taqwa are two examples of Islamic search models, and Imhalal.com, which is no longer available, encountered a problem that led to a decrease in traffic from 800,000 visitors after one month of launching to less than 10% of that initial level. It attempted to filter out search keywords rather than search results, and this appears to be a major flaw in their algorithm that draws results from Google itself, or Yahoo! using Yahoo! BOSS. If Imhalal.com had instead filtered out results to queries such as ‘naturamax’ (Query NSFW), parents and Muslims might have had more trust in it. ‘Taqwa.me’, a recent addition to the Islamic search engine market, provides even more interesting results, as it not only depends on an algorithm that may or may not be flawed, but allows users to flag content as being ‘Haram’ (i.e. offensive content that contradicts Islamic laws and guidelines).
At first, it appeared to be a better approach to filter out offensive search results, but for couple of days, it did not seem efficient. Particularly, it provides query results that lack the sophistication to filter out images from queries, such as the term ‘Bikini’. As a Muslim during some seasons, it is obvious that these search engines definitely have potentially become something more than they are, but at this point, they cannot be recommended to users who think a wrong search term to produce results they want to avoid. Searching on the trusted religious scholars could be a solution to the huge conflict about Islamic content, since the population believes in the term and needs to retrieve related, concise and accurate information. The Holy Quran is a rich Islamic material written in the standard Arabic language, and has been worshipped for 14 centuries. However, the language has undergone many modifications and, consequently, the Holy Quran is now not fully understood by the majority of Muslims. It was both easy and difficult to find topics with Hadith as one of the common topics to search the Hole Quran (Zaharah, 2014). Thus, the best solution to address the philosophy of Islamic content is likely used semantic search engines (Ishkewy and Harb, 2015) or hybrid search engines (Tarawneh and Al-Shawakfam, 2015).
On another side, high quality examples in religious sentences are written in context from Arabic reliable resources. Arabic is the most widely spoken language with an estimated 400 million speakers (Darwish & Magdy, 2013). Arabic shares many commonalities with other languages. These commonalities pertain to morphology, vocabulary, word-order (subject-verb-object and verb-subject-object), use of short and long vowels, etc. Arabic words are typically derived from roots that are composed of two, three, or four letters, with three letter (tri-literal) roots being the most common. Words are constructed from roots by possibly inserting infixes, adding prefixes and suffixes, or doubling constants. Diacritics are often omitted in writing and helped disambiguate words. Nouns could be singular, plural, or dual, and masculine or feminine. Arabic has a broad sphere of influence which is mostly due to religious reasons, where Arabic is the language of Islamic scholarship and that of the Muslim holy book, the Qur’an.
This solution has yet been fully investigated, and we believe the emergence of research centers throughout the region and Islamic nations will help develop this highly in demand algorithms. Until then, researchers will continue to provide algorithms and hope for the best.