Search engine giant Google on Monday launched its offering in Hindi and promised to make available contents including apps, videos and blogs in other Indian languages as well, hoping to attract 300 million new Internet users in India by 2017.
The search engine giant has joined hands with various companies, including media houses to expand its base further into India, buoyed by the increasing number of Internet users in the country.
Google has created an Indian Language Internet Alliance (ILIA), a consortium of 18 industry partners, which seek to promote growth of Indic-language content online.
This was announced by Google’s Senior Vice-President Amit Singhal at a function after Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar unveiled Google’s new website, www.hindiweb.com. The website seeks to enable Hindi speaking Internet users discover “the best Hindi content” across websites, apps, videos and blogs.
Google also showcased demos of its voice search in Hindi. Javadekar extended the support of the government to the (ILIA), as one of the key policy initiatives that would enable faster growth of Internet and mobile-based services.
Currently, there are over 200 million Internet users in India, about 16 per cent of its population of 1.2 billion. Practically, all of the country’s English-speaking population of 198 million is already online. The remaining 90 per cent of Indians who are not online tend not to be English speakers.
