Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 15
By Fatih Karimov - Trend:
Iranians use google search 25 million times a day.
Mehdi Naghavi, manager of Iranian Internet search engine project, said Iran ranks 6th worldwide for using google search engine, Iran's Mehr news agency reported on Feb. 15.
He made the remarks on the sidelines of unveiling the first Iranian Internet search engine project, dubbed Yooz.
Naghavi added that Germany, French, Italy, and China rank 10th or more for using google search engine.
The country has recently launched another domestic search engine named parsijoo.ir.
The issue of developing domestic search engines was raised for the first time in 2010 during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Since then the government has been pursuing the ways to replace Western Internet search engines with its own homegrown version and increasing control over Iranians' access to the World Wide Web.
It should be noted that several of world's most popular networks, such as Twitter and Facebook are banned in Iran, while users are still able to access them via proxies. A proxy allows bypassing 'gates' meant to block certain sites.
A survey by Iranian Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports indicates that 69.3 percent of the country's young generation use proxy servers to by-pass the filters and access banned Internet websites.