Semantic web, meet Middle East. Middle East, Meet Kngine!

Kngine, the first semantic search engine in the Middle East is now online in beta. And it works as promised!

The engine, while Middle Eastern focused, also works great on various global and international topics and can provide on-the-spot suggestions, related results and even calculates the average city weather per month.

While it’s no WolframAlpha, Kngine has been entirely created by a 2-man team. It could be a great Google/Wiki search alternative if you’re looking for quick and fast information, especially if it’s Middle Eastern related.

According to Kngine’s Egypt-based founder, Haytham ElFadeel, Kngine actually has advantages over WolframAlpha:

Kngine is a general question answer engine not limited to a few domains.

Kngine can answer more complex queries and questions like: How to speak Arabic, top 15 country by natural gas imports, top country by military expenditures, Microsoft Acquisition.

Kngine can also display information about concepts, such as: Movies, Companies, Cities, etc.

If Kngine can’t answer the question, it will return normal Web results that could help the user.

Kngine supports many languages for search.

Kngine was designed to provide meaningful search results by providing semantic information about concepts and keywords and creating relationships between the two. Kngine can also compare and link various related concepts like movies, subtitles, photos, prices, user reviews, and influential stories.

Their overview document shows a simplified idea of the relationships:

We’ve also noticed that it’s quite Arabic friendly! While the semantic results are displayed in English (Arabic to be introduced in 6 months), Kngine had no problem associating Lebanon to its Arabic name,لبنان and the United Kingdom to المملكة المتحدة. Arabic searchers can also lookup explanation of verses from the Quran.

Here’s some suggested search items from the founder himself:

Kngine can provide meaningful structured information about more than 7 million concept, such as: Jim Carrey Movies, Seattle, The Lord of the rings, Google Acquisitions, Henry Moore Artworks, etc. Answer questions like: What is the distance between berlin and NYC, Top 10 countries by electricity production, Sony founders, STS-90 Astronauts, Who is the director of Wanted, What is the highest structure, Microsoft software, etc. Also Kngine can compare stuff together such as: Egypt GDP vs UK GDP, IPhone 3G vs IPhone 3GS, etc. Also Kngine can perception words have multiple-meanings such as: Cairo, Leopard.

We suggest you start by taking the tour, and explore the ‘Things To Tries’. Also, please contribute by helping them fix the English typos!