GoodBye Onkush: The Arabic Search Engine from Egypt Shuts down.

Launched at GITEX 2007, Onkosh.com was one of the few Arabic search engines that poped out from the region. The project is part of Orascom Telecom subsidiary. A telecom, mobile, ISP, web hosting and online media and emarketing giant in the Arab world. Where they have a number of online properties including LinkOnLine which operates MSN Arabia in partnership with Microsoft.

Onkush provided search capabilities in Arabic for websites, photos, forums, files and blogs as well as news. The Arabic search engine was one of the first to invent transliteration of Arabic Language, that allows users to search in Arabic by writing Arabic words using Latin Alphabet without having to install Arabic support on your PC. In this front Onkush competes with Yamli, Google Ta3reeb and Micosoft Marin along others.
In Arabic search it competes with Google, Yahoo Arabic Search, Araby and Ayna.
Today we were tipped that Onkush announced on its website that it is closed now

“Goodbye, Thanks for all the support over the past few years…..”

We do not know when Onkush.com was shutdonw, but in Nov. 2008 we wondered why Onkush is not part of MSN Arabia search? The site however was using Microsoft bing, which might be part of LinkOnLine deal with Microsoft.

This might be the reason behind shutting down Onkush as there is a conflict of Interest between Onkush and bing.
I will contact LinkOnLine and update you with their reasons behind this closure.

GoodBye Onkush.
#Thanks Ammar Mardawi for the tip.