Damrej, A New Local Thematic Web Search Engine

Damrej is a newly launched thematic search engine developed to make it easier for users to look for different items they want to buy online, special offers, cars, properties, jobs and more.

Damrej takes a local approach, and has been launched for Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Libya and Egypt for the time being; with versions for the UAE and other countries to follow soon.

The services’ robots crawl different websites from the country building its indexes of shopping catalogs, jobs, real estate offers, cars and other types of classified ads; making them all searchable from one central point. The results provide some collected details about the item and point to the original website where the item or offer can be found.

Some merchants or classifieds services also provide an updated feed directly to Damrej to make it even easier to index their content and provide through the search engine.

Users can search by theme, narrow their search by using theme-specific filters, and get results from one or all online services depending on their choice. Related offers are also served up next to the items found through the search.

After a really short subscription process, users can save results/offers they liked to their favorites so as to be able to go back and find them anytime. A history of all their searches and visited items is saved automatically too.

Users will also soon be able to setup alerts for specific searches, so they get notified whenever new items or offers become available that match their search criteria. RSS feeds are made available for all themes, current offers and popular items.

Social features to enable people to share interesting offers with their friends as well as a facebook application are currently under development.

The very first iteration of Damrej was built under a different name and was meant to be a search engine for jobs, but then the team chose to expand it to other types of offers.

Damrej is available in French and English, depending on the country, for the time being. I expect an Arabic version is on the way. The team behind Damrej is made up of two Tunisians, Hamza Ghandouri and Mohamed Miled Mrassi.