Proposing a Model for Explaining the Economic Impacts of Implementing Local Search Engine’s National Plan in Iran with Considering the Role of Government Intervention and Mediating Factor of Startup Performance

Today, search engine services are one of the most widely used and basic ICT services in all countries. In recent years, many leading countries such as China and South Korea have managed to achieve macroeconomic and micro level economic impacts, with the establishment of Local search engine, given their specific cultural and linguistic characteristics. Therefore, the policy makers of Iran having understood such a necessity went on to implement a national plan to support development of Local search engines in the country. Since one of the main goals of this project was to improve economic aspects, the purpose of this research is to examine and explain how the economic impacts of the local search engines have been gained. for this purpose, Initially, through interviews with the main actors of this plan, the factors influencing the economics of the search engine were identified that includes: 1) business startups , 2) search engine program, 3) ministry (ICT) and 4) governance . Then the evaluation indicators of each factors were extracted through the study of  formal documents of the search engine project. Furthermore collecting field data was done by selecting a sample of active startups in the search engine program. The findings and results of this research based on data analysis using the PLS3 software showed that the significant economic effects of this national plan were merely due to the support of this national program from the start-ups. Therefore, it has been suggested to support  startups for successful implementation of national projects . It should be considered that the intervening of governance institutions in the economic success of the search engine program had a negative impact.