Google.com.eg!

I was surfing in the security of God when I fired a Google search from Firefox. Lo and behold, the Google results page appeared right-to-left, with the navigation controls written in Arabic! After the initial annoyance - Arabic font is not rendered as clearly as Latin - I got curious at why the page language had changed. A quick surf to Google.com opened a Google.com.eg. So it's true, somebody finally did it!

Who did? I got this whois response from DNSStuff.com:

Sorry, Egypt doesn't seem to have WHOIS:
  IANA has no contact information for .eg; www.frcu.eun.eg has no WHOIS or web-based WHOIS.

Not very encouraging (or friendly on the part of the Egyptian Universities Network) . But a DNS lookup reveals that the address is registered to Google Inc. No surprise.

Anyway, some quick tests revealed that Google did not spend a dime on making Arabic search better. For example, see the difference between searching for اﻻهلى and searching for الاهلى. And by the way, what is the difference between the two? ;-)