Google launches regional domains for Tunisia and Iraq

Google on Thursday launched the domains google.iq and google.tn provide regional, pertinent search results for the countries of Iraq and Tunisia respectively. Google had previously routed searches from Iraq and Tunisia through other countries. Now, an Iraqi searching for, say, a shoe store is more likely to find one that’s closer to his or her location. The two new additions mean that Google now has 184 local domains worldwide, with 15 of those in Arab countries. ” The new domains will help people in Iraq and Tunisia find locally relevant information, faster,” AbdelKarim Mardini, Google’s product manager for the Middle East & North Africa, said in a blog post. “For example, a search for [central bank] on the Iraq domain yields results relevant to someone in Iraq, such as the Central Bank of Iraq. On the other hand, the same search on the Tunisia domain returns slightly different results.” With the new domains comes better support for each country’s languages. In Iraq, Google users can now search in Arabic and Kurdish. In Tunisia, Arabic and French are now supported. Google.iq and google.tn bring Google closer to its stated goal of covering the world’s top 40 spoken languages and 99 percent of all Internet users. The company says it plans to launch more domains in “the coming months,” but didn’t hint at what countries it was focusing on for those launches.