Arabic search guide

Shoppers in Arabic-speaking markets type in many ways: formal Arabic, dialect, Arabic written in Latin letters (Arabizi), English, or a mix. They make typos and write full requests. SeekGist handles all of this out of the box. You do not need to set anything up.

The examples on this page are real test queries on our public demo catalog (made-up electronics and fashion products). You can try them in the search box on the home page.

1. Spelling forms are made the same

The same rules run on your products and on every query, so different spellings of one word meet in the middle.

2. Units are understood

Numbers and their units are joined in one form, in Arabic and English:

3. Word endings and prefixes

Light stemming removes common prefixes (such as ال, لل, بال) and suffixes (such as ات, ين), but only while at least 3 letters stay. So للبرمجة (for programming) is also read as برمجة. Brand names and broken plurals come from a dictionary instead, for example جوال and جوالات.

4. Dialect, Arabizi and typos

A built-in dictionary knows common dialect words and Arabizi spellings, and a typo-tolerant engine catches the rest:

Words like ابغى or عايز ("I want") are ignored, so ابغى لابتوب searches for a laptop.

5. Synonyms

SeekGist starts with a shared list of electronics synonyms in Arabic and English. You can add your own in the dashboard under Synonyms, import or export them, and approve synonyms that SeekGist suggests from searches that found nothing.

• Two-way synonyms: جوال = موبايل = هاتف ذكي = smartphone; كيبورد = لوحة مفاتيح = keyboard.
• Phrases count as one thing: حامل شاشة means a monitor stand, not every kind of stand.
• One-way rules: laptop also finds product lines such as ThinkPad and IdeaPad, but not when the query has an accessory word such as "bag", so a laptop bag search stays a bag search.

6. Full requests (intent)

SeekGist reads the intent in a full request. Example:

لابتوب للبرمجة تحت 800 ("a laptop for programming under 800")

It also understands:

• Price words in Arabic and English: تحت, اقل من, بحدود, ميزانيتي, under, max, over, and k for thousands. Example: لابتوب العاب تحت 1000 (a gaming laptop, at most 1000).
• "Cheap" (رخيص, رخيصة, ارخص, على قد الايد, cheap): in سماعات رخيصة the best matches are re-ordered by price. SeekGist never sorts the whole list by price, so the results stay relevant.
• Use cases: programming, engineering, video editing and design ask for strong machines. Business, home and study only change the order.

On plans with AI rewrite, SeekGist can also ask an AI model to rewrite a hard request, such as هدية لابني يحب الالعاب ("a gift for my son who loves games"). By default (ai=auto) the AI runs only when it helps: price or use-case requests, long requests, unknown words, or a search with no results. The answer is cached, so the same request does not call the AI again. If the AI is slow or fails, the rule-based reading above is used, so search always answers.

7. Measured quality

These numbers are read from eval/report.md when this site is built (run of 2026-10-14 (commit d772f92)). nDCG@10 is a score from 0 to 1 for how good the top 10 results are; 1 is perfect.

A real store catalog (9,428 electronics products; the store stays private and is not named):

The public demo catalog (1981 made-up products, the queries on this page):

The Arabizi group of the demo catalog is the weakest part today: three Arabizi fashion queries (fostan, jakeet, 7itha2 riyadi) find nothing yet, because these spellings are not in the dictionary. The AI numbers were not made with a live model: an agent wrote the AI answers with the production prompt, so treat them as a stand-in until a live run. The method is in eval/README.md.