Google launches Tamil News and Tamil Transliteration

Media News

New Delhi, August 05, 2008

Google India reiterated its strong focus on serving Tamil speakers by announcing the launch of a new edition of Google News™ in Tamil and Tamil transliteration on Google Search, Blogger™ and orkut™ . Google believes that these launches will make it quicker and easier for the large population conversant in Tamil to be able to search for news and other information and to communicate with their friends and families.

Google News™ in Tamil, like other news editions, gathers news stories from the various Tamil news sources on the web and presents an automatically generated summary with links to the most important stories in each section. The Google News model is aimed at sending readers the best sources of news. Every link to a news story takes the reader to the news site where they can read the story in its entirety. This is the third Google News edition to be launched in India, after English and Hindi.

We recognize that it can sometimes be hard to enter Tamil text with existing keyboards. Google's transliteration technology enables the conversion from English text to phonetically equivalent text in Indian languages. For example, using transliteration, you could type "vanakkam" and we would convert it to Tamil script. We have embedded this technology in several Google products to make it easier to enter text in Tamil. Google search in Tamil allows users to start typing in English and automatically get query suggestions in Tamil. For example, if a user wanted to enter the query "ponniyin selvan" in Tamil, they simply need to start typing it in English.

Tamil transliteration in Blogger™ enables users to publish content in Tamil while using English keyboard for text entry. This is intended to make Tamil content more popular and more easily available in the online world. Tamil transliteration in orkut™ will make it easier to communicate with friends and family by exchanging scraps in Tamil.

We hope that these products will help bring the benefits of the internet to the millions of Tamil speakers in India and overseas.

For further information, please contact:

Google India

Communications & Public Affairs Manager

Roli Agarwal

E-mail: roli@google.com

Tel: 040-66193600

20:20 MEDIA

Kanika Khanna

E-mail: kanika@2020india.com

Mobile: 9810934606