Date:08/08/2003 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2003/08/08/stories/2003080802031300.htm

National

Google goes half-way `desi'

By Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore Aug. 7 . The world's most widely-used Internet search engine, Google, appeared this week in Indian garb — interfaces in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu and Tamil. Surfers trying to access the global search site www.google.com from India are being directed automatically to an

India-specific site: www.google.co.in which in turn offers buttons that lead to the five language interfaces.

However, the Indian language feature is presently restricted to a translation of the clickable and selectable tools on the page: The search and the results are still English-based. PC owners whose operating system is Windows XP will have no difficulty in reading these buttons in one of the five selectable languages.However, those who are still using the earlier versions, such as Windows 98, will be faced with some junk characters and a limited transliteration of the Hindi, Bengali or other words in Roman script.

Cybernews India On Line (CIOL) reports that this is because Windows XP supports some Indian language fonts — a feature that is not available with the earlier language versions. However such users can download the required fonts which are part of the "Brahmi" font set developed by the

Indian Language Technology Solutions group of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. The fonts (Mangal for Devanagiri, Latha for Tamil and Gautam for Telugu) are available for free download at the website of ILTS http://brahmi.sourceforge.net.

It is not very clear, what real advantage the Google Indian language initiative brings, for those surfers who presumably do not have a command of English since there is as yet no way to search for Indian language documents or enter search terms in one of the languages. However, the work of an M.Tech student, now ongoing, at the Indian Institute of Information Technology, may facilitate the search for Indian language documents using Indian language keywords (see accompanying box).

In recent days Google has strengthened the `advanced' features in its search engine and Indian users can now restrict search to pages generated in the country.Meanwhile, the Google news website launched last year — the world's first computer selected and continuously updated online newspaper — has also spawned an India-specific service.The bottom of the www.google.com/news page now features links to a choice of country-specific news pages for Australia, Canada, Germany, France, New Zealand, U.K., U.S. and India.The India news site, concentrates on general, technology, business and entertainment news from the country and draws heavily on the web content of leading Indian newspapers, including The Hindu.

A useful feature available among the "advanced features" allows one to search for news items that have appeared in a particular publication.

The Google all-computer-generated news site is the brainchild of Krishna Bharat, who began work on a special algorithm for the purpose while he was with the Palo Alto Research Centre of what was then Compaq, and then refined it after joining Google last year as Principal Scientist.