Top 20 websites in the UAE
Middle East > United Arab Emirates > Abu Dhabi, Ajmān, Dubai, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah, Sharjah, Umm al-Quwain
The most popular, most visited and the best websites on the internet, with a UAE / Middle East flavour! [Updated 2012]
TIME Magazine recently released an article, titled “25 Sites We Can’t Live Without” – some obvious choices and great finds in there, no doubt, however again a little disappointing since some of the choices are very USA focused. The rest of the world seems to be on the backburner again… in response here is a list of Top 20 websites that are making waves in the United Arab Emirates and the Middle East, based on traffic and popularity:
Google
www.google.ae and www.google.com
Google’s mission statement is, “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Google’s corporate philosophy includes statements such as, “You can make money without doing evil,” and, “Work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun,” illustrating a somewhat relaxed corporate culture. Google is well-known for its web search service, which is a major factor of the company’s success. Google indexes billions of Web pages, so that users can search for the information they desire, through the use of keywords and operators. Google has also employed the Web Search technology into other search services, including Image Search, Google News, the price comparison site Google Product Search, the interactive Usenet archive Google Groups, Google Maps and more.
Face Book
www.facebook.com
Facebook is the most visited social networking website on the world wide web with over 700+ million members. Facebook was originally restricted to members with a college or university email address, but has since been made available to any email address. People can select to join one or more participating networks, such as a high school, place of employment, or geographic region. Facebook is one of the most visited sites on the Internet and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is no exception.
YouTube
www.youtube.com
YouTube is a popular video sharing website where users can upload, view, and share video clips. Videos can be rated, and the average rating and the number of times a video has been watched are both published. YouTube was created in mid February 2005 by three former employees of PayPal. The San Bruno-based service uses Adobe Flash technology to display video. The wide variety of site content includes movie and TV clips and music videos, as well as amateur content such as videoblogging and short original videos.
Yahoo!
www.yahoo.com
The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine (Yahoo! Search), Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping, video sharing, and social media website and services. It is one of the largest websites in the United States. It used to be the most visited site on the web a few years ago, but has lost most of it’s share of search traffic to Google. Yahoo! purchased the regional Arabic portal Maktoob in 2009.
Windows Live
www.live.com
Windows Live Personalized Experience (also known as My.Live.com, previously Live.com) was a customizable portal launched by Microsoft in early November 2005. It was one of the first Windows Live services to launch.
Blogger / Blogspot.com
www.blogger.com
Free, automated weblog publishing tool that sends updates to a site via FTP. Blogger was launched by Pyra Labs in August 1999. As one of the earliest dedicated blog-publishing tools, it is credited for helping popularize the format. In February 2003, Pyra Labs was acquired by Google under undisclosed terms. The acquisition allowed premium features that Pyra changed to be free. About a year later, Pyra Labs’ co-founder, Evan Williams, left Google. Google purchased Picasa in 2004; it integrated Picasa and its photo sharing utility Hello into Blogger, allowing users to post photos to their blogs. It currently hosts a huge number of blogs, ranging from the personal to those used purely for business. Some blogs get large numbers of visitors every day yet remain hosted on Blogger’s free service.
Wikipedia
www.wikipedia.com
Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers; the vast majority of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet. Wikipedia’s name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a type of collaborative website) and encyclopedia. Wikipedia has approximately 7.5 million articles in 253 languages, 1.84 million of which are in the English edition. Arabic version: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_language
Twitter
www.twitter.com
Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as “tweets”. It was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with over 300 million users as of 2011, generating over 300 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. It has been described as “the SMS of the Internet.” Initially banned in the UAE, the service was opened up in 2008 and now has a thriving user community in English and Arabic.
LinkedIN
www.linkedin.com
LinkedIn is a business-related social networking site. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. As of 3 November 2011, LinkedIn reports more than 135 million registered users in more than 200 countries and territories. The site is available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, Russian, Turkish and Japanese. Quantcast reports LinkedIn has 21.4 million monthly unique U.S. visitors and 47.6 million globally. In June 2011, LinkedIn had 33.9 million unique visitors, up 63 percent from a year earlier and surpassing MySpace.
Dubizzle
www.dubizzle.com
Dubizzle is an online classifieds and community portal offering users the opportunity to buy, sell and find things within their community. Launched in 2005 by co-founders J.C. Butler and Sim Whatley, the Dubai-based company started off as an attempt to provide expats with an easy to use classifieds platform. As noted by Gulf Business magazine, they are one of the earliest “Dubai-centric community sites to emerge on the scene and has grown and developed with the city over time”. In December 2010, Dubizzle’s UAE portal was generating nearly 50 million page views a month with over 3 million visits. Today, Dubizzle is available in 14 countries and 20 cities across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) with platforms available in English, Arabic and French.
Babylon
www.babylon.com
This interactive tool provides you with a dictionary and additional information on words found within any Windows application. Forum, support pages, professional and adware versions.
MSN
www.msn.com
MSN (short for Microsoft Network) is a collection of Internet services provided by Microsoft. Initially released on August 24, 1995, to coincide with the release of Windows 95. The range of services provided has changed significantly since its release. The Hotmail webmail service was amongst the first, followed by the instant messenger service MSN Messenger, which has recently been replaced by Windows Live Messenger.
Maktoob
www.maktoob.com
Maktoob Inc. (Arabic: مكتوب) is an Arab Internet services company, founded in Amman, Jordan known for being the first Arabic/English email service provider. “Maktoob” in Arabic means “letter”, “written”, or “Destiny”. Maktoob today has more than 280 employees with offices in Amman, Dubai, Cairo, Riyadh, and Kuwait. On Aug 25, 2009, Yahoo! Inc. announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Maktoob.com, thus turning Maktoob into Yahoo!’s official arm in the MENA region.
Gulf News
www.gulfnews.com
Online version of the daily newspaper. Includes headlines, polls, articles, analysis, commentaries and weather updates. The UAE has a few major dailies, including Al-Bayan, Al-Ittihad, Al-Khaleej, Gulf News, Khaleej Times, Akhbar Al-Arab, Al-Wahda, Seven Days, Emirates Today.
Microsoft
www.microsoft.com
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, United States that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions. Microsoft.com is the main company site for product information, support, and news.
Kooora.com
www.kooora.com
The first site for Arab football tournaments featuring the Arab world with follow-up and analysis of all events related to football. The english equivalent is called goalzz.com
BBC Online
www.bbc.co.uk
BBC Online is the brand name and home for the BBC’s UK online service. It is a large network of websites including such high profile sites as BBC News and Sport, the on-demand video and radio services co-branded BBC iPlayer, the pre-school site Cbeebies, and learning services such as Bitesize.
Souq
www.souq.com
Auction website for the Arab World. The world’s first Arabic/English online auction, MazadMaktoob launched in 2000, has now evolved into Souq.com, aided by another one of Maktoob Group’s innovations, CashU. Souq claims to be the Largest e-Marketplace in the Arab World, featuring a wide selection of mobiles, games, computers, electronics, shoes, furniture, clothing, jewelry, watches and more
Masrawy
www.masrawy.com
Masrawy is a news site that serves mainly the Egyptian community and offers a diverse range of content ranging from political news, technical, economic, sports and other miscellaneous services
Honorable Mentions
Arabic, English Forums & Communities
Forums, communities and blogging have seen a huge rise in popularity in the UAE and the Middle East in general. Some examples of these popular sites include:
Arabic: Ma7room www.ma7room.com An online Arabic community that has quite a high amount of traffic. Owned by a company called Mega Web in the UAE, which also runs various other sites like dubaimoon.com, alwasluae.com, alwaad.net, a7ma7m.com, e7sasgalb.com, gateofislam.com, uae9.com, forums-mania.com, uaepets.com and 3yonuae.com
English: Dubai Forums | Discuss Dubai | Gossip Dubai | UAE Forums | ExpatGossip | Dubai Forum.co.uk | Dubai Property Forum | Expat Focus | HiDubai | Easy Expat | Allo’ Expat | MashUp – student community Evolve Auto Couture | Dubai Lime | Dubizzle | Mumtazz | iXpats.com – The Dubai Expat Diaries
About the United Arab Emirates: The United Arab Emirates (also the UAE or the Emirates) is a Middle Eastern country situated in the southeast of the Arabian Peninsula in Southwest Asia on the Persian Gulf, comprising seven emirates: Abu Dhabi, Ajmān, Dubai, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah, Sharjah, and Umm al-Quwain. The United Arab Emirates has the highest Internet population penetration in the Middle East.
About the Middle East: One widely used definition of the “Middle East” is that of the airline industry, maintained by the IATA standards organization. This definition includes Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Palestinian territories, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syrian Arab Republic, United Arab Emirates, Pakistan and Yemen.
Note:
This list is complied based on Alexa traffic rankings. If you know any sites that should be covered please let us know by leaving a comment below…we appreciate info on any websites that do justice to the economy, people and culture of the UAE, as well as sites that endeavour to serve the needs of its residents. All comments are moderated and spam will be deleted. Thank you for taking the time to make this list a one-stop resource for the best websites in the UAE!
23 Responses to “Top 20 Websites Dubai, UAE”
- 1 Pingback on Jun 28th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
- 2 Pingback on Oct 16th, 2007 at 8:08 am
What about
http://www.dubailime.com
It is growing everyday and has more members signing on each day…
There are a lot of cultural and social events that go on in Dubai for FREE but many people are not aware of it. What Dubai Lime is doing is bringing these social events to your doorstep. Making it easier for you to join in, and to enjoy yourself. It gives you access to people who you will like to hang out with, people that have art, music, intelligent conversation and a sense of community within them.
Your ideas count at Dubai Lime weather it is just a small gathering or a huge scale party.
Everyone matters at Dubai Lime.
I mean rather than giving it just a link here is some information about the website
…
Cheers guys.
I agree Dubai Lime is a killer killer ap – tricky to get around but once you do – wow!
Not related in anyway with those people, but I have used flowerstodubai (dot) com a few times, and I have to say the service was great. I didn’t know there was such a customer support in the UAE. Do let us know if there are such good services, I need to keep a list.
Hi,
Not to plug it but I think the Dubai expat community could benefit from using bringsome.com which is a free service bringing travellers, expats and anyone in need for international goods (from their home country) together.
Placing an ad is free so check it out?
Grts
bringsome.com
Dave Ruzius
I guess this is kind of like dubailime but there is also emiratesvillage.com
And i can see dubaijobspot.com being one of the top next year as we need something like this in dubai – its quite hard to find a job unless you look at classifieds.
hello every one,,,
I am Arvin from USA. If anyone want to buy an IPHONE, I have 5 with me of 8GB and unlocked so u can use for DU and ETISALAT. I was in Dubai and just came to USA So if u guys interested, plss mail me or call me at 001-732-3313143.
if i dont pick up the phone then email me, i will reply in 4 hours.
thanks
tell me ur last price im in dubai
Arabnews.com – The leading emglish language daily newspaper in the region out of the largest gulf market.
A new Dubai fan site cum blog called “Dubai for Life” has made its debut and aims to feature the best picks and fun content from the dynamic and fast-changing city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Check it out at http://www.dubaiforlife.com
Can u tell me how to reach directory assistance as I am trying to find someone in Dubai.
Ha! We developed the Dubai Lime website so it should certainly be on there! All of the sites are good – Community sites like the ones that we specialize on in H2O are too few and far between in Dubai.
I would like similar information for Abu Dhabi too and I find that Abu Dhabi is not as well covered as Dubai. I am not living in either towns but am considering doing so in the near future. Any info on Abu Dhabi would be appreciated. Thanks.
We sell Brand New/Unlocked Apple 8GB Iphone for just US$300 and also we sell all kinds of other Electronics.
Contact us on our Email for more informations: Rolland.coolman@sify.com
please advice me for any website for buying and selling of item /auctions….aside from souq.com…thanks you
The ad from Skymobile World Inc selling electrical gear and phones is a scam. This rolland coolman gets you to send the money via western union and then you do not get the goods. they then ask you to send more money because the wrong package was sent and it had extra phones etc in it. The only way they say they will release it is to pay their amount. In my case it was $2000 more. After numerous phone calls and over 50 emailsa i still have nothing and they say the only way they can rectify this is to send more money. I have reported them to the australian federal police and the relevant authorities
What about the blogs, the UAE community blog, Dubai at Random, Emirates economist and grapeshisha.com. What about the new national newspaper site. What about the kipp report, which is the best one at the moment.
Hey
Does anyone know that ‘Discovery Gardens’ are supposed to be like?
Also, is the traffic in Dubai as bad as what people say?
I agree with Sara, we should list the good local sites here which offer good content and service. I was looking for a good leather case for my mobile phone and I Googled the net and found out some good sites. I finally bought it from tbeyond.com
They have a wide range of mobile phone leather cases and i am very happy with the quality and style of the product.
Another service which i liked is bluebanana, they are advertising a lot now and looks promising. I havent used the service though, but i plan to use it soon!
I have also visited Dubai Lime and found it attractive, but the user base is not big enough to attract a lot of people. However i think it is in the right direction, coz we need something like that.. an online local community.
& Lynda, the traffic in Dubai is really bad. Maybe worse that what you have heard. It is a small place with lots of cars. But with 1 millionaire in every 67 people, i wouldnt mind the traffic!!!
Thanks for this list, I used to live in Dubai a long time ago, before there were any websites, so it’s great to catch up with it. I now feature some Dubai property on a site in the UK – funny how things go full circle…
I need Apple Iphone.
8GB.
Please contact :
Email- saad.jaan@gmail.com