For internet giants such as Google, emerging markets represent the next billion users
to get online . Lalitesh Katragadda heads Google's research for emerging markets (EMs), which includes India, Asia, Africa and Latin America. In an interview with Harsimran Julka and N Shivapriya, Katragadda says he ensures barriers such as language do not prevent millions of new users from getting online.
How is Google Search becoming more social?
From Search to YouTube to Gmail, all our products are becoming social. Google + is just the face of our social strategy. It is easy to find answers to 80-90% of the world's queries. It's the next 10-20% of queries that make you a game changer. Social search is making web more fun.
What is the challenge Google has set for itself in India and other EMs?
The challenge before us is to make the next 3 billion people go online in the next decade. In India, we have a target of getting the next 200 million users go online from the current 100-120 million. India also has about 150 million English speakers. And there is a dogma in India that English and IT are important, if your child has to make it anywhere. India will be able to easily achieve 150 million users but to reach about 300-500 million users is a big task and we won't be able to reach there unless we break the Indic barrier. The next web is going to be mobile, it's going to be Indic.
Is lack of proper input devices preventing internet penetration?
Yes. That's why we are pushing Android so hard. When we can make a grandmom use internet without using a keyboard, I think we can make the next leap. In future, people may not type, they may just speak. The problem is that we have good speech recognition engines for English but not for the Indic languages. It is a problem we are trying to solve.
harsimran.julka@timesgroup.com
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