The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Leading websites venture into regional language market

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Oct 04, 2006
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Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

Leading websites venture into regional language market

Rasheed Kappan

Many big names launch regional language portals

CATCHING UP: A file photo of people browsing the Internet at a cyber cafe. — Photo: H. Vibhu

BANGALORE: With Internet penetration showing signs of a big improvement in Indian cities, particularly in information technology-savvy Bangalore, the big names in the Internet are gearing up for a big dive into the vastly unexplored regional language market.

While Google, Sify and Rediff have already ventured into different languages, Yahoo, the current leader in emailing in India, has proposed to start six Indian language portals soon.

Google is still the market leader in the much used "search" arena. To further widen its canvas among the growing netizens, Google has launched its search service in Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi and Tamil. Sify had begun early, making it comfortable for users in Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi and Telugu to surf the Net, and even email in these languages. Rediff has now launched the Hindi version of its instant messenger, Rediff Bol.

With Rediffmail, you could send email in English, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya and Punjabi. Sify lets you to email in all these languages plus Sanskrit. Taking on the regional mask, even MSN has joined the bandwagon, launching sites in Tamil, Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam. Epatra is another site offering multiple language emails.

The leading websites have apparently realised that unless they get into the regional language market, offering a slew of services in different languages, chances of growth are limited. Currently, almost all Net-users in the country are English-speaking. This population of about 150 million is bound to be saturated soon.

Local language content is the right way to go. Confirming this was a recent survey by the New Delhi-based online research consultant, JuxConsult India. Based on its online survey of 20,000 Net-users, the firm discovered that 44 per cent of respondents preferred sites in Hindi and another 25 per cent wanted content in other local Indian languages. Being the leader in emailing, Yahoo has plans to launch its versions in other languages soon.

At the launch of its Search Marketing service in the city recently, the company officials had announced plans, without disclosing a specific date.

Internet analysts say the move could be big one for the portal, since a JuxConsult survey had found that 85 per cent of all personal email users in India had a Yahoo email account compared to 56 per cent for Rediff and 35 per cent for Gmail.

But email is not the only service that is making waves in the regional language market. With search engines such as "Anweshanam" in Malayalam; complete websites such as Webdunia in Hindi, Webulagam in Tamil, Webprapancham in Telugu and Weblokam in Malayalam; exclusive language portals on politics, cinema, news, health, travel, youth affairs and children, the regional internet is getting ready for that big explosion in internet usage outside the English-speaking world.

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