Talking Heads with Shailesh Rao

Durgesh Gupta - Televisionpoint.com | Mumbai
When in doubt, just google it. Google is the most popular search engine with net users. Shailesh Rao, managing director, Google India, talks about the future of the internet and what Google has to offer.

How important is India as a market for Google?
India is one of the focus areas for us. We have the opportunity of bringing capability here and we need to look at the different profiles of users in India.

A lot of them are language based. We continue to launch products that are relevant to Indian users. We have also launched a soft keyboard, which is a virtual keyboard in Indian languages. We also have the capability to translate in Indian languages.

What are the new initiatives taken by Google India in terms of e-governance?
We already have a tie-up with the ministry of tourism and YouTube. We are also actively talking with officials working for various levels of government, although there is nothing to divulge at this point of time.

What is the scope of local search engines in India?
In India, there is immense potential and need for localised search engine on the internet. People want to find information. They want to find about government services, information about location and so on.

The challenge here is to cater to the masses. What is more interesting here is the lack of local information. So, if a search engine is localised, it would be of tremendous interest.

What are the main focus areas for Google in India?
Our focus is on internet accessibility on mobile phones. We plan to enable access of information on mobile phones. We have invested heavily on bringing this service. We already have a tie up with Airtel for Google search on mobile phones.

We plan to strengthen this service. It has huge potential. In India, we believe there is a tremendous opportunity in mobile advertising. We have seen lots of success around the world in providing our type of advertising on a mobile device.

Google is known for innovating and adding new products to its portfolio. But Orkut, a social networking site of Google, has added new features, which seems inspired by Facebook. What's your take on this?
Developing a product is an ongoing exercise. We are continuously evaluating and adding new features. We keep looking at what users want. And we give it.

For this, we don't look around the market and see what else is on offer. Customer satisfaction is most important. Adding features also gives an opportunity to entrepreneurs to develop and create new applications. It's a wonderful setup for them to showcase their product and the users also because they get to use a variety of services. Some of the things, which we have done, are make social networking sites more secure. It is one of the primary concerns.