Turkish Government Building Search Engine

The government of Turkey is, via the Information Technologies and Communication Board (BTK), building its own search engine aimed at Turkic and Muslim countries.

One motivation is the difficulty existing English based search engines have with some Turkish characters. However the primary drive behind the project appears to be security. According to Tayfun Acerer of the BTK:

All internet communication data goes to foreign countries and then it returns. This activity has a security aspect.

That’s certainly true and there are privacy worries about the amount of search data Google collects. However I can’t help wondering if the motivation is less about keeping search information from Google than making it available to the Turkish government. And, of course, an officially controlled search engine would have the ability to censor search results.

Paranoid? Perhaps, but Acerer also discussed the related Anaposta email project. The plan is that every Turkish citizen will be given an official government email address at birth on their ID Card. This will be used in association with a new Turkish email system.

Very convenient. But Acerer goes on to say:

So, will have a mobile network that can be used thanks to id number match and foreign networks, such as Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail, will not be used anymore

Hmm. All the country’s email going through a government system that can relate associate an email address with an identity card? It couldn’t happen here.

Could it?

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