Search engine guru Google moves first yet again as it makes its mobile web

RELATED ARTICLES Yahoo again in leadership turmoil as Thompson quits Yahoo CEO out, investor Loeb gets board seats Google executive Nikesh Arora to get $8m in lieu of stock

browser independent of telecom service providers, allowing users to access the net, regardless of their connection. Google has also created a customised India-centric news search strategy. This ploy will see competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft scurry to devise their own mobile browser approach.

India is a high mobile density nation but has abysmally low internet penetration. There are just 30 million PCs in the country as against 300 million Indians using mobile phones. According to Ernst & Young, the ability to access internet directly through mobile phone browsers will spur the growth of Internet users.

Google India product manager Prasenjit Phukan said the search engine’s mobile solutions would allow high-end phone users — blackberrys & PDAs — to access Google directly through their mobile phone browser, regardless of which telephone provider they use. “Most of our desktop products/services are web applications which users navigate to directly using a browser. We want to build the same brand on mobile for our products so that users can find and use our services,” says Phukan.

Google has customised its mobile browser keeping in mind the Indian user. For instance, if a user keys in a search for ‘SRK’, news items on the actor are thrown up first, followed by other web search results. It also remembers the user’s recent search locations to provide relevant local results in subsequent searches without retyping the location every time.

Google has recently entered into localised services in India. It launched a new translation service from English to Hindi. This service, unlike other Google translators, enables Hindi translations by typing the Hindi words in English.

To access Google search on mobile, users now can simply type http://www.google.co.in on their mobile browsers.