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Yorwa is a new search engine dedicated to finding short quotes from social networks.

The service, which launched at the end of 2012, relies on an algorithm* that monitors public entries on social networks like Twitter and Facebook among others. “We do not track any private messages; instead we only use publicly available information that is accessible to anyone,” explains Ali Youssof Salihi, the Founder and developer behind its search engine.

Other algorithms from the service searches quotes, either religious, poetic, or prose from public posts.

The service is available for Android devices as well on the website.

Ali Salihi is a specialized researcher in the field of digital processing of the Arabic language at the University of Birzeit, who, after discussions with family and friends, sensed that a large number of users find it difficult to look for and share quotes with friends on social networks which in turn lead him to develop Yorwa.

The application recently won the Mobily Developers’ Competition. “The win means a lot to me and motivates me to transform it into a specialized, stable and robust search engine (…) the award will help us develop the service further, especially in the mobile space where we previously had trouble developing for various platforms, namely iOS, due to lack of funds. The award will also enable us to provide more services that we will reveal soon, in addition to taking the engine to the global stage,” expressed Ali.

The index is currently in beta, and contains 3.5 million quotes according to Salihi. However there are 7 million additional quotes that haven’t been indexed yet and cannot be accessed by users at the moment, “and the number has been growing daily.”

The team currently has plans to upload 2.5 million quotes, which would bring the total of indexed quotes to 6 million. Users can share quotes on social platforms either from the Yorwa search engine of from the paid application.

Here is a list of tips to fully benefit from the application.

Ali plans to set up a company and develop a marketing plan for the engine and the app.

The app is available in both a free and paid version. The free version however seems sufficient for users, as the perks that you get from purchasing the paid version however seem minor. I personally believe that releasing a paid version is slightly premature. The paid version costs one and a half US dollars. Buying it also enters you into a ballot that could win you a free smartphone.

Salihi states that Yorwa is able to handle nunation and Arabic diacritic marks. It can also generate derivatives for words. We tried to do that with “حسب ”, however the app failed to retrieve “حاسوب ” among the results.

One troubling issue that we encountered with the service was the Yorwa sometimes added punctuation, squares and spaces that were not present in the original text.

And while the service is in Arabic and processes Arabic quotes, the privacy policy and the terms of service were in English.

The application is still in its trial period, and we trust that these minor technical issues will be fixed, since this is an innovative solution, and we genuinely believe that a great number of people need such a service.

“We have plans for partnering with some other existing projects, and our team will discuss the idea of joining an accelerator,” Ali concludes his statements to ArabNet.

You can download the free Android application here, and the paid version here. You can also download it from the Mobily store here, or you can add the Chrome extension here.

On a related note, the award for best application went to Hazem Ahmad al-Hakami for his “صلاتي ” app, while the best design award went to Gene Mohammed Talha al-Jebawi for the “إعراب القرآن الكريم ” app. The ceremony is a yearly event, currently in its second edition, organized by Mobily for app developers. Each winner received 30 thousand US dollars

For more info, follow Yorwa on Facebook and Twitter.

*An algorithm is a step-by-step procedure for calculations, used for calculation, data processing, and automated reasoning. In computer systems, an algorithm is basically an instance of logic written in software by software developers. For more information, you can follow this link.