Google targets India with country specific products

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 21 August 2007 01:52

Your IT - Home IT

In what it says is a major initiative to step up its Indian operations, Google has launched facility to enable Indian users to find information on local businesses like restaurants, shops and hotels on the web.

Also, any business will be able to load its information on the site, at - http://local.google.co.in . The move makes India one of the few countries to have a country-focused Google labs programme. Globally, Google has seven labs across the US, China, Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain.

"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," Google India R&D head Prasad Ram said.

India is the world's largest democracy and as such would be more attractive to Google than other large developing nations, such as China which impose restrictions on its services.

Google says that the India labs "will serve as a platform to showcase innovations relevant to the local market and allow users to take a peek into Google's future offerings. The products will emerge from Google's global research centres, including its R&D centre in Bangalore and cater to the needs of local users."

The India labs will also showcase the Indic on-screen keyboard that enable them to type search queries in 14 Indic languages by choosing letters from an on-screen keyboard using a mouse.

Users will be able to add the gadget of their chosen language to their personalised iGoogle home page and use it to search for content in their language. The Google Indic transliteration tool will also allow the user to type in Hindi using phonetically equivalent English text entered through an English keyboard. The Hindi transliteration was launched on the Blogger service early this year.

The product offering will enable users to create Hindi content and use it in applications of their choice such as mails, documents and so on.

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