Yemenportal

YemenPortal.net is a public news gathering, sorting and searching engine similar to news.google.com except that it is dedicated to Yemen. The portal is currently exclusively assigned to crawl and index news items from dozens of Yemeni news websites, but will in the future expand to include other sections such as business, tourism, and community-related services. The website was established as a media project of the Master of Arts in Global Journalism program at Örebro University in Sweden. Among its objectives is to study and analyze the Yemeni cyber sphere and assess the impact of websites on Yemen in the political aspect. Given that it has an essentially neutral stance and makes no distinctions between sources or articles, it was approved as a research tool for its founder Walid Al-Saqaf, whose scheduled to graduate from the MAGJ program in the summer of 2008. YemenPortal.net's search engine has a variety of ways in which information could be displayed and sorted. Users could browse the latest news from a specific politically affiliated set of sources (such as opposition for example). Results could be sorted based on updated time, the source, the times they were read, etc. On average the crawling engine could fetch and parse up-to a thousand articles per hour. Through YemenPortal.net, users interested in Yemen's news can find the latest news with minimum effort. Content is refreshed at least once every 30 minutes, making it possible to find news items a few minutes after source news websites publish them. The portal also offers RSS feed subscription, which is a powerful means to stay updated automatically. Yemenportal.net applies the latest publicly available technology in retrieving, parsing, and indexing information.