Turkey's first Kurdish search engine 'Serketin' goes online


Turkey's first Kurdish-language search engine has gone online after five years of research and development.Serdar Anuştekin, the site's manager, told Anadolu Agency on Thursday that the company behind 'Serketin' ['success' in Kurdish] would also launch a Kurdish-language video-sharing site in the upcoming months.Speaking at Anadolu Agency's regional directorate in Diyarbakır, Anuştekin said: "Currently our site has been broadcasting in all languages. Our aim was to include other languages spoken in Turkey like Laz, Zazaki [spoken by Zaza Kurds] and Armenian."He said that he started the project -www.serketin.com- in 2010 and completed it in 2015 so that people could speak in their own language and introduce their own culture.Segregation and discrimination against the Kurds and the Kurdish language ban ended with the reconciliation process which was initiated in 2009 with the efforts of the then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Erdoğan and his Justice and Development (AK) Party who lifted the ban on using the Kurdish language, inaugurated the channel TRT Kurdi which is broadcast in Kurdish, and re-started direct investments and projects to Kurdish-majority cities in the eastern and southeastern regions of Turkey.