In the process to widen the target audience, Google, one of the world’s most popular search engines has now become ‘local’ as yellow pages and ‘desi’ as regional and Hindi site, announced Vinay Goel, Google’s Country Head in India, for products and Prasad Ram, R& D head for Google India in Bangalore on Aug 21,2007.'Our vision for the 60th year of independence is to empower Indian users by providing organised accessible information and products. The India labs is one such effort to enable users to test and provide feedback on products that are relevant to them’, said Prasad Ram.
Google has now launched its search engines in Hindi, Nepali, Sinhala along with 12 regional languages, so that the regional surfers, who are not so efficient in English can now search and browse internet in their mother tongue. Users will feel more proximity with this new flavor of Google tools. Besides this now Google has also been local like yellow pages in which any one can search the local business of any particular city or can add their business in the online Google directory, informed Google official to the media.
Google software engineers M.T. Raghunath and Gokul Nath Babu Manoharan in a Google blog post said, “In line with our mission of making information universally accessible, we're now offering an easier way to search in 14 Indian and South Asian languages,".
Google has developed this tool at its India-based development labs as well as the large number of Indian-origin engineers at its U.S. headquarters. Google has launched a slew of products for the large number of potential users of its services in this country, who may be challenged by their lack of proficiency in the English language. It has seven labs across the US, China, Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain.
Google has simplified the search tool by entering a virtual keyboard and transliteration tool, which transforms the typing words phonetically in English Script in to Hindi (Devnagri) and other regional languages chosen by the users according to their mother tongue. Many vowel and consonant combination has been provided for typing on the virtual keyboard. User can type the text on the virtual keyboard and paste it onto Google search window and also can create Indian language contents in other applications such as blogs, spreadsheets or word processors etc. User can also search queries directly on the search window only using mouse by selecting the available vowels and consonants that would generate the desired query on the search window. Google had earlier already launched the Hindi transliteration for Blogging service this year.
In the other service the company has launched a local search tool like other local magazine or yellow pages, in which Indian users can access any information on local businesses like restaurants, shops and hotels of any city on the web. This will usually provide the address, contact numbers and location of local shops, establishments and institutions and will also link their own websites if available. Users can also upload their business and its profile on these tools. “We have provided a link where local businesses could upload their own profiles, pictures and service descriptions”, said Vinay Goel.
The links to the Indian language keyboards and the Hindi transliteration tool is available at the home page of Google India Labs: http://labs.google.co.in/, while the local search tool is available on: http://local.google.co.in/, for adding new business details on the web follow the link: www.google.co.in/local/add.
SOURCE : NEWS TRECK INDIA
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