New Delhi, March 15, 2007 – Google today reiterated its strong focus on serving Indian language speakers by announcing the launch of Hindi transliteration on Blogger™, Google’s web publishing service, and Google News™ news service in Hindi. Google believes that these two launches will enable the masses conversant in Hindi to have quicker and easier access to more information thus enabling creation and consumption of Indian language content.
Google’s transliteration technology enables the conversion from English text to phonetically equivalent text in Indian languages. Hindi transliteration on Blogger enables users to publish content in Hindi while using English keyboards for text entry. As an example, users can write "mera Bharat" and this feature will convert it into the corresponding Hindi script. Keeping in mind that the audience is bilingual in many cases, Google allows the users to freely switch from English to Hindi and back.
Google News in Hindi based on Google’s innovative clustering technology, gathers news stories from various Hindi news sources, and presents a ranked one page view with links to users favorite news sources in their favorite news sections. Though Google backs and encourages the adoption of Unicode UTF-8 standard by all Indian language sites, this launch would enable users to reach content from even those news sources which are not yet in this format. As these news sites transition, Google will internally convert their content to the Unicode UTF-8 standard for the benefit of its users.
"Google is committed to promoting the creation and consumption of content in Indian languages and we’re proud to launch our first Indian language edition for Google News and Blogger. These launches will enable our Hindi- speaking users to express themselves better and access information in a language they are comfortable with, " said Prasad Ram, Centre Head, Google India R&D. "Google™ search is already available in Indian languages such as Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil and Marathi. We had also recently launched the Google Toolbar™ search bar in Hindi. At Google we know that more information means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for people."
Google’s innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google’s targeted advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. For more information, visit www.google.com.
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Roli Agarwal
PR Specialist
Google India
roli@google.com
(91) 040-66375555
Sarah Gideon
20:20 MEDIA
sarah@2020india.com
(91) 011-26933291-97
Sarah Gideon
20:20 MEDIA
Google India
ruby@2020india.com
(91) 011-26933291-97
Labels: Inida news announcements
