Every evening over the last 12 months, 26-year-old technology consultant Sanyam Jain went around the thoroughfares and bylanes of Greater Noida, a Uttar Pradesh town bordering Delhi. As he walked, Jain made note of the photocopy shops, restaurants and supermarkets that he had seen and later, he would log on to Google’s Mapmaker and mark those places on his map of Greater Noida. The use of Mapmaker, conceptualised and developed by Lalitesh Katragadda at Google India, isn’t restricted to India. In Myanmar, when Cyclone Nargis struck in May 2008, volunteers used Mapmaker to recreate the transport network to the worst-hit areas, which hastened the Red Cross’s arrival there.
Changing landscape
- Google India has developed Google Finance, Transliteration and Quest
- It has collaborated in SMS Search and Voice Search
- The company is now looking to the mobile phone to drive growth
- Applications using SMS search could be handy
- Local search and content set to grow big
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The developing markets and specifically India are playing an important role in Google’s evolution. “Enabling the world to come online is the next big challenge…. There are one billion people with some access to the Internet, but there are five billion people who don’t have it,” says Mario Queiroz, Vice President, Product Management, Google.
Google is now looking to the mobile phone to drive growth. With over 400 million mobile users in India, Google will lean on its two R&D centres to develop solutions on this platform (See Next Mobile Revolution, pg 42). Already, engineers at Google’s two centres in Bangalore and Hyderabad have developed new products and applications such as Google Finance, Transliteration and Quest, besides actively collaborating in areas such as SMS Search, Voice Search and social networking initiative Orkut.
As at Google’s other R&D centres, engineers in India, too, can cash in on their “20 per cent time” to work on their personal innovations. Globally, this initiative has resulted in products such as Google News, Google Suggest, AdSense for Content, and Orkut, “products that might otherwise have taken an entire start-up to launch,” says Queiroz.
Mario Queiroz
Products such as Mapmaker mark a shift in Google’s focus. Even in its core search business, Google has had to change tack. “The web is not just web pages … it is becoming more diverse with maps, books and research papers available on the net,” says Queiroz. “We’re continuing to make sure the right medium is in the right place on a search page.”
Despite these changes, some basics of Internet search—relevance and speed—continue to be of prime importance, he adds. Already, Google is making investments in the area of local content, which has seen rapid growth. “There is a lot of interest in local information.... We have discovered that a large percentage of queries have local intent,” says Queiroz. Besides using Google to search for a Chinese restaurant near your house, Queiroz says that Google, in turn, gives businesses greater opportunities to unleash more targeted advertising on consumers.
In India alone, Google claims to have content from 40 cities across the country and is constantly looking to grow both the breadth and depth of this local information, he adds. But with a few of its initiatives including Google Earth and, more recently, Street View mired in fiery privacy debates, the company’s new businesses initiatives may face several challenges during their implementation.
