The Hindu : Business : Google working on speech, multimedia content search

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Oct 14, 2004

Business

Business

Google working on speech, multimedia content search

BANGALORE, OCT. 13. Internet company, Google, has been working on speech and multimedia content search on the Internet, but believes that text search will continue to be dominant in future. "We believe text will remain dominant for many many years," Google co-founder and President (products), Larry Page, told reporters today at the company's India R&D centre here.

Page and Sergey Brin (who heads technology), the two founders of Google, are on their first visit to India. They are confident that their India team would build `great products' for the world.

Google has set up here the `mirror image' of its Mountain View office in the U.S., with about 10 people, and is `hiring aggressively'. The company officials, however, would not say how much money would be invested or how many people would be recruited at the company's Bangalore and Hyderabad centres.

"We were too late ourselves, (we would have) preferred to do it sooner. But there are only so many things we can do at once," Mr. Brin, who joined Mr. Page while studying at Stanford University and worked on the project that became Google, said.

Google India R&D Centre co-head, Lalitesh Katragadda, said Google scientists were working on an "expanded image search," besides a demo lab, using speech search. His colleague, Krishna Bharat, who is credited with inventing Google News, said they had begun working on understanding the nuances of Indian languages to make possible internet search in east Asian scripts.

Mr. Brin said the company had been continuously refining Google search and has felt the need to do more work in improving the rankings. "Search is good business and it is a competitive business," he said, adding that Google technology was better than rival search engines. Mr. Page said additional features were to be added to Gmail, Google's free e-mail service, which is now being offered on invitation, before making it available to more users.

PTI

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