Birzeit Grad Wins Informatics Award for Arabic Website

The search engine "Yourwa" has won the Sheikh Salem Al-Ali Al-Sabah Informatics Award for the best Arabic website for 2013. "Yourwa" is a search engine created by a Birzeit University graduate namely Yousuf Ali Salehi.

The annual Sheikh Salem Al-Ali Informatics Award is awarded to the best informatics websites and smart applications. Informatics is a broad field related to computing applications and how they operate in social fields. This year 5,907 applicants submitted entries, out of which 2,017 were accepted and five sites and three smart applications selected to win the contest.

Speaking about "Yourwa," Ali Salehi described it as “a search engine specialized in what is told or narrated in the form of a religious text, literary text or short poem or saying, where special algorithms follow up on social networks and websites.”

Ali Salehi has earned his BA in computer systems engineering in 2008 and an MA in business administration in 2012 - both from Birzeit University, and focusing on research and software tools for the Arabic language. “In 2008, my graduation project won in the Arab world graduation projects competition,” he said, “which was held at Petra University in Jordan. This award was one of the main reasons I continued my work on digital processing Arabic language.”