With a desi touch

AMERICA ONLINE (AOL), the world's largest Internet Service Provider, has finally decided to come to India. An announcement from Bangalore sometime back, says AOL plans to invest $ 100 million in India over the next five years to offer a variety of Internet-related services. All we can say to Internet's biggie is: `Join the Club!'

Why? Because all through 2000, the leading global net portals and search engines, have been trickling into India, to set up special localised versions of their international websites. So today, surfers in India have the choice of using some of these justly famous Internet tools, with the content localised for Indian interest - sometimes even specific to one city.

Yahoo, the pioneer among general information portals, was the first to go 'desi' last year (www.yahoo.co.in) and they have done a great job in Indianising their well known and much copied search format. There are 262 news sites with links to leading Indian dailies and magazines. The education section is particularly strong and in the section for Graduate studies, one can find links to institutions in the city, like the Madras University, Anna University, Sri Ramachandra Medical College, Madras Institute of Technology and Stella Maris College. However, some of these links are non-official sites ( like the Stella Maris site) and the information may be scanty.

Yahoo also provides 21 city-specific sites - including Chennai - with a useful compilation of local travel, tourism and shopping guides.

The two well known search engines, AltaVista and Lycos have also come out in an Indian `avatar'. Altavista (www.in.altavista.com), like its International namesake is strong on scouring the web for what you want - and has installed an `Indian Web Searcher' and a dedicated multimedia searcher. It is one of the few engines that has an instantaneous translation feature.

Lycos too (www.lycosasia.co.in) has strong Indian language features and they have wisely incorporated the well known Indian language e-mail feature "epatra" which allows one to write Hindi, Tamil and other languages in Roman script, which is automatically transcribed into the correct script.

Microsoft's own portal MSN was in `beta' or trial version for over four months last year before becoming a full fledged Indian version ( www.msn.co.in). The advantage here is the quick link to the Hotmail facility and the MSN Messenger instant messaging feature.

For those who look for a site dedicated to news from the Information Technology sphere, the site ZDNet (from the US technical publishers, Ziff Davis) has started an India-specific site, www.zdnetindia.com which keeps a close watch on goings on in the Indian computer and communications industry. ZDNet has since become part of another such technology portal, CNet - and as of this past week this too is in the process of constructing a 'made-for-India' site.

These 'desi' global portals give us the best of both worlds: the proven professionalism of the originals plus content that we can relate to. Here's looking at you kids!

Test your bandwidth

Ever wondered why your Internet connection seems to fly like an eagle one day and crawl like a tortoise the next? Frustratingly, this can happen with the same basic speed of connection - say 44 or 56 kilobits per second. I have just come across a very easy test feature on the Net which will allow you to ascertain the exact line speed while you are connected - as well as the maximum speed at which you can expect to download ( the two can be quite different!).

The "Bandwidth speed test" as it is called, does a free check of your system by sending a packet of data to your computer and getting it back - in about 10- 20 seconds. It then prints the line and download speed it has determined, on your screen. The feature can presently be accessed from both commonly used browsers, Netscape and Internet Explorer. To access from Netscape ( www. home.netscape.com), click on the "Computers" button in the opening menu, this will take you to Netscape's "Computing" page. You will find a button on the right that says: "Hot links from ZDNet". Click on "Bandwidth speed test" among these links - and the rest is done automatically.

To access it from Internet Explorer, click on the "Computing and the Web" button on the msn.com opening page, which will take you to MSN's Computing Central page. You will find a featured link to "bandwidth tests". If you still have questions after getting a feedback about your current speed, there is a detailed FAQ which will set at rest most doubts.

Here's to better and faster access to the Internet!

A. VISHNU

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