Having lost majority of the market in China to rival, Baidu, the big 3 are embracing the Indian internet market developing tools and content for the regional diversity. Yahoo! India has launched 7 regional language portals – Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Telugu and Tamil. This is a step in the right direction considering the fact that only 9% of India’s newspapers are in English, 42% in Hindi and 49% in other local languages. Google labs has released Indic Transliteration and iGoogle Gadgets. I tried the transliteration tool but it is far from being matured and lacks the usual Google’s Cool and Wow factor. eBay’s Kijiji is trying to launch localized version in Hindi.
With increased penetration of internet in smaller towns and rural areas, demand for local language content will be far higher than it is today. In 2001, non metro internet userbase wast mere 27%, at the end of 2006, it had touched 39%. According to a survey by Juxt Consult, only 41% of the Indians want to surf the web in Engish today down from 59% a year ago.
Guruji, Indian regional language search engine is trying hard to index the content and reports woes such as availablity of numerous proprietary fonts and failure to adopt Unicode standard by Indian vernacilar websites. To address this shortcoming, proprietary technology is being developed to convert many of these non-Unicode fonts to Unicode fonts.
So if you have a consumer oriented or user generated content on your website, then its time to think of going vernacular, atleast in Hindi.
Some Inputs from India Internet Report, CLSA Asia Pacific Research.
Tags: Web India, Localization, Yahoo Google, Internet India