by Mohammad Ghazal | Mar 06,2012 JORDAN TIMES

AMMAN — Although Internet use is growing faster in Arab countries than anywhere else in the world, experts said the amount of Arabic content on the web remains “disappointing” and called for serious initiatives to increase it.

Arabic content represents about 3 per cent of the five million terabytes of total content on the Internet, Anas Tawileh, director of Systematics Consulting, said at a workshop on Arabic content yesterday. Each terabyte is equal to one trillion bytes, he said, noting that it would take a person 38 billion years to read all of the content on the Internet.

“Arabic content, whether academic, scientific, economic or political, is lacking on the web, although Internet penetration growth in the Arab world is very high,” he said.

In the Middle East, there are an estimated 78.62 million Internet users, a number that grew by 2,293 per cent between 2000 and 2011, according to http://www.internetworldstats.com.

Arabic speakers account for 5 per cent of Internet users worldwide, according to Google.

About 65 per cent of Arabs using the Internet surf the web in Arabic and look for Arabic content, according to Tawileh.

“There are no exact figures on the amount of Arabic content on the web,” he said, but noted that about 500 million pages in Arabic are accessible through the Yahoo search engine, and 2.5 billion through Google.

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