Bringing The Global Web To India

A few weeks ago I blogged about search suggestions, a feature that made it easy to enter queries in Indian language scripts. Once you are able to do that and start searching, you'll quickly discover another barrier that non-English speaking users face in India - there just isn't much good content available online. No matter how good the search engine, it can't return relevant information if it doesn't exist! This situation is beginning to change in a few areas -news and entertainment for example - where lots of Indian language websites are being created. However we still have some way to go before the Indic web has enough high-quality content to satisfy all the information needs of users.

What can we do in the meantime? Well, Google has an interesting approach to this issue - automatic translation. If you do a search in Hindi and scroll down to the last search result on the first page, you'll see a link to a result that's been translated from English. For example, try querying for सरकारी नौकरी and scroll down to the bottom of the results page. You'll see a link to a translated query result. Clicking on the link takes you to a translated query results page. Here's how this works:

1) We will take your Hindi query - "सरकारी नौकरी" - and translate it into English - "government job".
2) We'll then run the English query and get back English results.
3) We'll translate those results back into Hindi for you.

All these translations are done automatically, using a machine translation engine developed at Google. This technology allows you to translate any text or web page instantly. Here's the Times of India homepage automatically translated into Hindi. Of course, because these are machine-generated translations they will never be as good as human translations (and they can even be quite funny) but the quality should be good enough for you to understand the sense of what you're looking for.

A neat and unique way of using technology to help bring information to users, even when it doesn't exist in their language.

Better Search in Hindi

One of the core value propositions on the web, and one that is certainly near and dear to Google's heart, is search. Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

For our purposes, the operative words are world and universal. So how do we fulfill this core mission in India, for those who would prefer to interact in their local language rather than in English? Of course our core search technology works across languages and has been adapted to the specific needs of each language. Apart from this there are some specific features we launched on Google Hindi Search. I'd like to showcase one of them here. We launched this in response to the difficulty our users faced in entering Hindi text.

Problem: Hard to enter Hindi text on a regular english keyboard.
Solution: Easy Hindi search in 3 steps - Pictures say it louder than words.

Step 1: Start typing in English and you'll see Hindi suggestions




Step 2: Select your query from the drop-down list















Step 3: View the results of your search in Hindi





We have this feature available in seven other Indian languages:

• Bengali
• Telugu
• Marathi
• Tamil
• Gujarati
• Kannada
• Malayalam

Happy searching!

Chicken or Egg?

Google India had its first ever Google Developer Day, held in Bangalore on October 18th. I spoke about our Indic Transliteration API, which makes it possible to add Indic language tying to any website in a very simple manner. (more about this API and other Indic tools a later post).

What struck me as I spoke to the developers at the conference is a sense of uncertainty about the market opportunity for Indic language products and services, so I thought I'd set down some thoughts on how I look at this market.

The opportunity.

• In an earlier post, I outlined some of the demographic and socioeconomic statistics that set the context for this opportunity. Bottom-line: India is getting richer and more literate at a much faster pace than its learning English.
  
• In every country around the world, as the internet provided compelling content and applications in local languages, people found value in them. This is true across Europe, Asia and the Americas. There is no reason to think India is different.
  

The ecosystem

• The bottleneck is this: people won't go online until hey find value, and the value creators (content producers, application developers) won't make the investment until they find people online. How to break this logjam?
• If we look at how the internet developed in the US, it may provide a useful analogy. For the purposes of our discussion, we can break down this evolution into three phases.
• First came content. This was mostly produced by communities people who had a passion for putting up content they cared about. Traffic and monetization was mot the motivation.
• Second came growing readership as people started discovering this content. This set off a virtuous cycle in which content eventually because a viable, monetizatable business.
• Third (and final) were the application developers who could now focus on moving the online experience beyond passive consumption of information to interactivity, community building, service delivery and a host of other innovations.

The Indic market was stuck in phase one for a long time, and (I believe) has just recently entered phase two. There are some signs to back this up - the growing number of newspapers launching online editions in local languages, the growth in the number of tools available for entering local language text using an english keyboard (Google, Quillpad among others).

Are you ready?

Improving Lives Through Search

One of the most common questions I'm asked when I talk to people about building products and services in Indian languages is, "Why?" The unspoken thought behind the question: those who don't know English in India are dealing with more basic sorts of problems - web search is a luxury that can have only tangential impact in their lives.

I beg to differ.

One of the most powerful features of the web is the democratization of access to information. With the web, consumers can be free of value-extracting middlemen and brokers of information. With the web, consumers can reduce information asymmetry. That isn't a luxury - it's a powerful tool to improve lives.

Imagine a sick child, and parents who have no easy access to medical care. The web can yield information to understand symptoms and help parents provide basic treatment. Imagine a bright school student who attends a poorly-run and managed school that will ill-prepare her for college and the job market. If this student could access educational content online, it could transform her life prospects.

Search can improve lives. And it helps those people most who have the least access to alternative sources of information - typically those lower down in the socio-economic ladder.

One of the things I like to do is to read Google's customer testimonials from time to time. I've reproduced a few below. This isn't a pitch for Google - you can replace "Google" with the more generic "search" and the message is equally powerful.

Message from: Abigail

"Google helped me discover that my daughter's strange medical problems are part of a rare genetic syndrome that most of her doctors had never heard of. Her doctors diagnosed her after I brought them the information, and my discovery helped her cardiologist diagnose another patient with the same syndrome. Because of my daughter's new diagnosis, we have uncovered other dangerous but treatable problems that we wouldn't have known about until they caused her serious damage. So, I'm very grateful to the people at Google who made all of this possible. Thank you."

Message from: Ann

"I just wanted to let you know that Google may well have saved my life. My sons and I were walking home from having eaten out. A half block from my house, I felt this pressure building in my chest. Immediately, I thought, 'heart attack' and ran through how I'd been feeling that the day (I had been nauseated). My first thought was, 'confirm suspicions,' and immediately, upon arriving home, I went to Google and typed in 'heart attack.' I kept thinking, 'you only have minutes...' I found a site that listed symptoms. Indeed, I was having a heart attack. I was at the Albany fire station within minutes. Five baby aspirin later, and a few squirts of nitro and I was in the ambulance on my way to the hospital. The good news is, I have no residual damage. My heart is back to normal. Thank you for providing the Google search engine. I'm sure my recovery was complete because of the speed within which I was able to get help."

Message from: Laura

"Last year my daughter, who was a senior in high school, was afraid of failing her math final. I did a search on Google and came up with more than one method of explaining the formulas...She passed the final and ended up with a B in the class instead of a C. "

Onashamsakal

On this festive occasion, I'd like to wish all Malayalees Onashamsakal. To celebrate the occasion, Google just launched a News edition in Malayalam. You can learn more by reading our post on the Google News blog. Of course, if you're looking for more information on onam or on any other subject, in Malayalam, you can also use Malayalam search. It's very easy to type in Malayalam using a normal english keyboard: you start typing Malayalam words in english, and we will generate Malayalam suggestions for you to select as your query.

Hello? Testing.. 1... 2... 3

Is this thing still on?

My last blog post (before this one) was exactly sixteen months ago! It's amazing how time flies. I blogged back in April of 2007 about our imminent move from the Bay Area to Bangalore. Well, the move happened, and my wife and I have been in Bangalore since May last year. What with getting used to a new city, a new job (Product Manager at Google), a new social life (or lack thereof), blogging took a back seat.

What's pretty neat is that in the time that I've been away, I've actually been working on many of the themes that I've blogged about: product innovation in developing countries. My focus during the last sixteen months has been on Google's Indic language strategy and figuring out how best to bridge the language barriers that make the internet so daunting for the vast majority of India's population.

I hope to pick up where I left off in May last year. Is it possible to resuscitate a blog after a year? I hope so. I'd like to revive this blog, share my thoughts and ideas, and get your feedback. In the meantime, take a look at some of the stuff Google is doing in India.

I'm Back (With News)

My apologies for the long silence. I've been working through some recent developments in my professional life. In fact, they pertain to the focus of this blog, so I will share them here. If you've read this blog with any regularity, you know that I am very optimistic about India's growth prospects over the next 25-30 years. Sustained growth for 25+ years is transformative - we've already seen how 15 years of growth (since the 1991 reforms) have utterly changed the urban landscape. This is arguably the most profound development globally that I will witness in my lifetime. I'd like to participate in it, and help where I can, rather than watching from afar (in my case, from the Bay Area in California).

With that in mind, my wife and I have decided to move to India. We will leave the Bay Area in a couple of months, and move to Bangalore. I will join the Google office in Bangalore (they're hiring!) as a Product Manager. It's an exciting role, in a great company, at a time of enormous opportunity. I can't wait to get started!

I intend to keep blogging, during and after the transition to India. I hope that the changed perspective I can bring from being on the ground in India will be useful.

Thank you all for your patience during the long period of silence. I'm back in the blogosphere and would love to hear from you! Send me your comments and thoughts! In particular, if any of you have moved from the US to India, I would love to get your advice as we plan our move back.

The end of IT?

I was struck by two articles I read recently. The first was this little nugget from the more comprehensive survey conducted annually by the good people at CIO Magazine:

The average CIO makes $23,562 less in real dollars today than five years ago.

The average salary for CIO's at large companies is still almost $300,000, so I'm not shedding any tears. Still, these numbers are certainly on a trajectory that suggests that the IT department is becoming less, not more, important, to the businesses they serve. Notice that I said "the IT department" not IT itself. The importance of IT is not in question here, its how it is delivered and accessed that is the issue. Which brings me to the second article. This article, subtitled "Consumer technologies are invading corporate computing" (subscription required) appeared in the last issue of the Economist magazine. It talks about business users taking more control of their productivity tools, from IM and VoIP to Email and Calendaring. If the IT department is not on board, they are simply bypassed by their users. The article mentions Adrian Sennier, CIO at Arizona State University, who recently moved the entire university to a productivity bundle from Google called Google Apps for your Domain. The article goes on to say:

For Mr Sannier, however, a bigger reason than money for switching from traditional software to web-based alternatives has to do with the pace and trajectory of technological change. Using the new Google service, for instance, students can share calendars, which they could not easily do before. Soon Google will integrate its online word processor and spreadsheet software into the service, so that students and teachers can share coursework. Eventually, Google may add blogs and wikis—it has bought firms with these technologies. Mr Sannier says it is “absolutely inconceivable” that he and his staff could roll out improvements at this speed in the traditional way—by buying software and installing it on the university's own computers.

Is this the end of IT as we know it? Software as a service, empowered users, tools to allow encoding of business rules and workflows by non-technical users - what will this mean for the IT department of tomorrow? Or, for that matter, to the legions of IT consultants (whether onsite or offshore) who assist them?

Google Checkout for Mobile?

Picking up where the last post left off, the ideal market for mobile payment systems should have three characteristics:

• Rapidly rising income levels (demand is high)
  
• Small internet footprint, and even smaller e-commerce footprint (supply is low)
  
• Large mobile penetration (potential is large)
  

Countries like India and Brazil provide great markets to test products before moving them more broadly to other markets.

The basic requirements for mobile payments systems include:

• Ease of use. No-hassle account setup and configuration.
• Wide device support. In developing economies this means not required data-enabled phones to provide the service.
  
• Built-in security. Specially important if service is provided on non-data-enabled phones.
• Flexible payment options. This includes support for different credit/debit cards, links to bank accounts and stored value (pre-paid) options.
• Localization. Gaining wide user adoption will require localization features, including language support and tie-ins to local payment processing (regional banks, microcredit organizations).
• Leverage existing infrastructure. Critical to building a large merchant base quickly is to make it as easy as possible for them to accept the new payment form factor using their existing technology investments, where possible.
  

The key shift is to use mobile payments as a "leapfrog" technology rather than a substitute technology. In other words, move the market from online last-click replacement to physical store retailing, or TV-based retailing.

There are two small entrants into the market, recently VC-funded, that I'm aware of:

• Paymate: Kleiner Perkins invested $5M. Broad device coverage (works on SMS), but only for Citibank customers.

• Ji Grahak: Helion Ventures invested $2M. Broad financial institution coverage, but requires a credit card and requires a GPRS java-enabled phone.

How far off do you think Google Checkout for Mobile is? And where do you think they will launch?