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The Daily Star on line
Lebanon goes on-line with unique website
Michael Karam
Features editor
There are a helluva lot of people out there who probably want to shake Edmond Ibrahimian by the hand. He’s responsible for the software that helped design the impotence wonder-drug Viagra. Yes, he was an integral cog in the machinery that has brought smiles to the faces of many who thought they would never again, to coin an American phrase, get back in the saddle.
However there are probably a helluva lot more people out there who are equally appreciative of Ibrahimian’s work with search engines, the websites that function as information finders on the Internet. He has designed Lebhost, the first search engine exclusively “dedicated to collecting data on anything related to Lebanon.” He is also the brains behind Green Cedars, a Lebanon home page where people can create their own sites for free. It is all part of Ibrahimian’s drive, since 1993, to create an efficient information system for Lebanon and the Lebanese Ibrahimian is in Lebanon on a brief visit. The jovial 38-year-old, a Lebanese of Armenian descent, was educated at Broummana high school and AUB. He left Lebanon in 1982 to study in the US where he gained a PhD in computer science.
He sees Lebhost as a revolutionary service. “Basically the difference is this: if you tapped in ‘tiles’ into a regular search engine for instance, you would get a zillion responses from tile manufacturers all over the world, as well as home pages of people with that name. With Lebhost, you would find only the agents and manufactures of tiles in Lebanon who use our site. The same can be applied to real estate.”
And he was right. A quick nip into the Yahoo search engine offered me 718 sites for tiles, including one for Laurie Tiles llama farm in Peru. Real Estate harvested a staggering 17,313. This was what Ibrahimian wants to avoid.
Using Lebhost the second generation Lebanese-Australian whose parents come from Tyre and who has a hankering to buy property there can check into the search engine, type in real estate and hey presto, is immediately faced with an offer for a 320m2 Tyrean duplex, a bargain at $80,000. Similarly Alberto Haddad, a Brazilian, whose parents set up shop in Sao Paulo at the turn of the century can see what his Lebanese cousins are doing, simply by tapping in the word Haddad, of which he will find 270 matches. The curious Brazilian browser will find everything from Metn MP Antoine Haddad’s address to information on the reverend archmandrite Georges Haddad.
“The whole site smells of Lebanon. As far as I know Lebhost is the only search engine designed for a specific country and Lebanon is unique in that it is has so many immigrants spread all over the world. Lebhost is one way of bringing together the diaspora,” Ibrahimian said.
There are currently around 700 subscribers with about 50 new subscribers joining every month. This is a growth rate of seven per cent a month. But what of the future? Ibrahimian is seriously considering leaving the pharmaceutical industry and returning to Lebanon to concentrate on search engines and innovative software. “Why not? I just love this place.”
Sites can be located at:
http://lebhost.com.lb
http://www.greencedars.com.lb
DS: 27/05/98
Source: Hagop Topouzian
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