Official Google India Blog

Business Photos Comes to India

2012-05-22T12:31:00.000+05:30

In 2010 we started a project in select cities worldwide to take photographs of business interiors. In this pilot, we’ve been taking 360-degree photographs of businesses, with their permission, to highlight the qualities that make their locations stand out. In addition to the photos that business owners can upload directly through Google Places, these photos help potential customers get a better view of the decor, merchandise, food, and more on each business’ Place Page and on Google.com.

We are now excited to bring this pilot program to India, starting with Hyderabad and rolling out to several other cities. The photographs are shot by Google appointed photographers who work directly with the business owner to arrange a time to do the photo shoot. The images will show prospective customers the interiors, decor, merchandise — and all of this will be done at no cost to the business owner. The panoramic photos will appear alongside other still photos on a business’ Place Page and can help potential customers get a better sense of what an establishment has to offer and if they’d like to visit it in person.

If you’d like your business to be considered for a visit from Google’s photographers, you can learn more and express your interest by filling out this form. Right now we’re focusing on businesses like restaurants, cafes, spas, salons, gyms, showrooms, and retail stores, but all are welcome to apply. While we’ll only be able to take panoramic pictures of a portion of those who apply depending on the demand, any business owner around the world can easily upload their own still photographs and videos to their Place Page by logging in to Google Places.

Posted by Rahul Kulkarni, Senior Product Manager

India pilot details and FAQs - Business Photos

Announcing the 90 Regional Finalists of the Google Science Fair 2012

2012-05-22T10:48:00.000+05:30

[Cross-posted from the Google Science Fair Blog]

Congratulations to the regional finalists of the second Google Science Fair! These top 90 entries from around the world represent some incredibly innovative and groundbreaking science.

This year’s competition was even more international and diverse than last year. We had thousands of entries from more than 100 countries, and topics ranging from improving recycling using LEGO robots to treating cancer with a substance created by bees to tackling meth abuse. Our judges were impressed by the quality of the projects, and it was no easy task to evaluate the creativity, scientific merit and global relevance of each submission to narrow down the entries to just 90 finalists.

Thirteen of our 90 finalists have also been nominated for the Scientific American Science in Action award, the winner of which will be announced on June 6 along with our 15 finalists. These top 15 and the Science in Action winner will be flown out to Google’s headquarters in California in July for our celebratory finalist event and for the last round of judging, which will be conducted by our panel of renowned scientists and innovators.

Now, let’s get excited for the results!

The regional finalists in each of the three age categories are:

ASIA (Age 13 - 14)
Sadanand Patil, India
Utkarsh Gupta, India
Anjan Venkatesh, India
Aravind Muraleedharan, India
Nitya Raju, India
Aditya Jain, India
Sumit Singh, India
Ayushi Khedkar, Shraddha Kukade, Pournima Shinde, India
Nihar dalal, India
Shravan Patankar, Abhishek Dedhe, India

ASIA (Age 15 - 16)
Ivan Jie Xiong Ang, Malaysia
Marco Ochsner, Ludwig Hruza, Singapore
Edith Loo, Li Yin Tan, Singapore
Rohit Fenn, India
Hamza Azhar, Pakistan
Benjamin Chan, Paul Jeanbart, Singapore
Xi Xu, China
Scott Guan, Cher Yeoh, China
May Ning Law, Shi Hui Ang, Ruixin Ng, Singapore
Akshat Boobna, India

ASIA (Age 17 - 18)
Shaoxiong Luo, Singapore
Mark Borris Aldonza, Philippines
Geoffrey Tanudjaja, Singapore
Michael Teoh, Singapore
Shan Tan, Singapore
Wenqing Yan, Ronghui He, Singapore
Chung Kyu Kim, Ho Shin Cho, Joo Hee Lee, South Korea
Raghavendra Ramachanderan, India
Kay Yi Low, Singapore
Wataru Ogasa, Takeshi Kitagawa, Youta Nakagawa, Japan

EMEA (Age 13 - 14)
Sakhiwe Shongwe, Bonkhe Mahlalela, Swaziland
Carlos Vega García, Spain
Natanel Levis, Israel Marcin Pitek, Poland
Ana María Santos Espósito, Spain
India Hannon, Naomh Hannon, Isabelle Bond, England
Isabel Medrano Sáinz, Spain
Anthony Carmoy, France
Alexey Kozlov, Milena Klimenko, Ukraine
Ralph Moran, Ireland

EMEA (Age 15 - 16)
Artem Mosiyenko, Javed Lindner, Germany
Mohammed Al Eydan, Saudi Arabia
Pablo González Recio, Alvaro Cuevas Alvarez, Alejandro Sánchez Lechón, Spain
Shahd Al Jasser, Saudi Arabia
Iván Hervías Rodríguez, Marcos Ochoa, Sergio Pascual, Spain
Gonzalo Balbás Moñivas, Spain
Judith Calvo Rull, Spain
Omar Obeya, Egypt
Karsten Roth, Germany
Menna AbdelGawad, Saudi Arabia

EMEA (Age 17 - 18)
Danijar Hafner, Germany
Eugen Hruska, Germany
Till Speicher, Paul Georg Wagner, Germany
Ibrahim Khalil, Egypt
Eduardo Sancho Calzada, Alejandra Bargues Carot, Laura García Marco, Spain
Muireasa Carroll, Mairéad Kingston, Denise Hurley, Ireland
Melvin Zammit, Malta
Abdallah Reda, Egypt
Adrián Díaz, Sandra Garrido Romero, Spain
Philip Glass, Callum Middleton, England

The Americas (Age 13 - 14)
Kriti Lall, USA
Anirudh Jain, USA
Jonah Kohn, USA
Mark Liang, USA
Andrew Chen, USA
Raymond Wang, Canada
Garima Singh, USA
Arjun Mahajan, Maya Flannery, Jonathan Berman, USA
Suruchi Ramanujan, USA
Martin Schneider, Joshua Li, USA

The Americas (Age 15 - 16)
Kimberley Yu, Phillip Yu, USA
Natalie Ng, USA
Rishabh Mazmudar, USA
Emily S. Wang, Trevor Wang, USA
Joshua Meier, USA
Catherine Wong, USA
Katherine Zimmerman, USA
Sabera Talukder, USA
Grace Brosofsky, USA
Alejandro Andres Fuentes Herrera, Chille

The Americas (Age 17 - 18)
Daniel Wang, USA
Brittany Wenger, USA
Yamini Naidu, USA
Karen Resnick, USA
Grace Pan, USA
Yuhao (Danny) Huang, Canada
Blake Smith, Vickram Gidwani, USA
Pascal Gendron, Canada
Yassine Bouanane, Canada
Ricardo Enrique Alba Torres, Jessica Alba Torres, Colombia

The Scientific American Science in Action Award nominations are:
Anjan Venkatesh, India
Sumit Singh, India
Geoffrey Tanudjaja, Singapore
Sakhiwe Shongwe, Swaziland
Carlos Vega García, Spain
Mena Abdel Gawad, Saudi Arabia
Mark Liang, USA
Andrew Chen, USA
Catherine Wong, USA
Sabera Talukder, USA
Grace Brosofsky, USA
Ricardo Enrique Alba Torres, Jessica Alba Torres, Colombia
Katherine Zimmerman, USA

Thanks to all of the students around the world who submitted projects to the Google Science Fair and congratulations to all the young scientists who were selected as regional finalists.

Posted by Sam Peter, Google Science Fair Team

Missed registration this year? Click here to sign up for a notification when registration opens for the Google Science Fair 2013.

Google+ Hangouts On Air: broadcast your conversation to the world

2012-05-08T18:13:00.000+05:30

[Cross posted from the Google Official Blog]

Last year we introduced Hangouts On Air to a limited number of broadcasters, enabling them to go live with friends and fans, for all the world to see. Since then, this small community has grown the feature in lots of creative ways. And they’ve made one thing crystal clear: when groups of passionate individuals can broadcast live, together, the results are truly remarkable:

Today we're excited to launch Hangouts On Air to Google+ users worldwide. So if you have something to say—as an aspiring artist, a global celebrity, or a concerned citizen—you can now go live in front of a global audience. With just a few clicks, you’ll be able to:\

Broadcast publicly. By checking "Enable Hangouts On Air," you can broadcast your live hangout—from the Google+ stream, your YouTube channel or your website—to the entire world.
See how many viewers you’ve got. During your broadcast, you can look inside the hangout to see how many people are watching live.
Record and re-share. Once you're off the air, we’ll upload a public recording to your YouTube channel, and to your original Google+ post. This way it's easy to share and discuss your broadcast after it's over.

Of course, launching millions of live stations takes some doing, so we're rolling out Hangouts On Air gradually, over the next few weeks. In the meantime you can save the date for an upcoming hangout...

- CBS This Morning: May 8th at 4:20am PT / 7:20am ET	- Cadbury UK: May 11th at 1:30pm PT / 4:30pm ET
- Conan O’Brien: May 8th at 7:30pm PT / 10:30pm ET	- The Nerdist: May 11th at 3:00pm PT / 6:00pm ET
- CNBC: May 10th at 1:15pm PT / 4:15pm ET	- Jamie Oliver on Food Revolution Day: May 19th at 5:00pm PT / 8:00pm ET
- Global Poverty Project: May 10th at 4:00pm PT / 7:00pm ET	- A special series from The New York Times’ Opinion department

… sign in to Google+ to see what’s live right now, or find inspiration in the many broadcasts that have already aired.


A news van for everyone. KOMU-TV anchor +Sarah Hill invited locals to share live coverage of the recent protests in Montreal; Fox 11 LA anchor +Maria Quiban invites viewers to join her on Good Day LA.	Town halls with today’s leaders. President +Barack Obama, Governor +Mitt Romney, UN Secretary-General +Ban Ki-moon, and many others have connected with citizens via hangout.


Live concerts from your living room. Musical artists like +Suite 709 and +Daria Musk perform live for those inside the hangout, and for everyone else tuning in.	Classes anyone can attend. Chef +Larry Fournillier, Professor +Noah Diffenbaugh, and +FAWN share their cooking, climate change and fashion expertise, respectively, via hangout.


Roundtables about any topic. Photographer +Trey Ratcliff, soccer football enthusiast +Sabotage Times and celebrity trend spotter +Young Hollywood talk about the issues they find interesting.	Face-to-face meetups with all of your favorites. +David Beckham, the +Miami Hurricanes, +Tyra Banks, the +Indianapolis Colts and +Geek & Sundry have all enjoyed meet-and-greets with their fans.

We can’t wait to see what you’ll share with the world.

Posted by Chee Chew, Engineering Director

Google Apps Vault Brings Information Governance to Google Apps in India

2012-05-08T14:36:00.000+05:30

Today we’re announcing the availability of Google Apps Vault (Vault) for Google Apps for Business customers in India. Vault is an easy-to-use and cost-effective solution for managing information critical to your business and preserving important data. It can reduce the costs of litigation, regulatory investigation and compliance actions.

Businesses of all sizes need to be prepared for the unexpected. In today’s environment, using Vault to manage, archive and preserve your data can help protect your business. Litigation costs can really take a toll on a business when minor lawsuits can run up to many thousands of dollars, and larger lawsuits can cost even more. Significant litigation costs come from having to search and find relevant data, which is also known as electronic discovery (eDiscovery).

E-discovery can be part of virtually any litigation and requires you to search, find and preserve your electronic information such as email. Vault helps protect your business with easy-to-use search so you can quickly find and preserve data to respond to unexpected customer claims, lawsuits or investigations. With an instant-on functionality and availability of your data a few clicks away, Vault provides access to all of your Gmail and on-the-record chats and can provide significant savings to your business over the traditional costs of litigation and eDiscovery.

Additionally, Vault gives Google Apps customers the extended management and information governance capabilities to proactively archive, retain and preserve Gmail and on-the-record chats. With the ability to search and manage data based on terms, dates, senders, recipients and labels, Vault helps you find the information you need, when you need it. Vault gives management, IT, legal and compliance users a systemized, repeatable and defensible platform that will reduce the costs and risks of doing business. With just a few clicks, the business can access a service designed for security and providing auditable access to critical information.

Vault was built, by a global engineering effort that includes India, on the same modern, 100% web-based architecture as Google Apps. Unlike traditional solutions, it does not require a complex and costly IT environment, and can be deployed in a matter of minutes. Vault brings the security, ease-of-use and reliability of Google Apps to information governance. It can help meet the sophisticated requirements of large organizations and makes these advanced capabilities available to business of all sizes.

Google Apps Vault can be added to your Google Apps account for an additional $5 per user per month starting today, so contact our sales team or a Google Apps reseller if you are interested in signing up for Google Apps and Vault.

We hope that Vault, together with Google Apps, will make a difference to your business and provide the right solution to reducing risk and cost so you can focus on growing your business.

Posted by Jack Halprin, Head of eDiscovery, Google

India Site Clinic: Get your Site checked today

2012-05-04T16:56:00.000+05:30

Namaste Webmasters!

In January, Matt Cutts from the Webspam team visited India and in a Hangout on Google+ addressed many of your doubts and questions. As a follow up, the Search quality team at Google India is very excited to conduct a clinic for your website, right here on the Google India blog.

What does this mean?
Our team will analyze the websites submitted to the clinic. We will offer constructive advice on improvements that can lead to better visibility for your website in Google's organic search results.

So how do I submit my entry?
To register your site for our site clinic, fill in the information requested on the form here.

(Do note that by submitting your site you agree to the use of your website as an example in our future blog posts under the Site Clinic banner.) We also have a few important guidelines that you need to follow:

1) To participate, your site must be registered on Google Webmaster Tools. This is to ensure that the submitter is the owner of the site and we have the owner's permission to use the site for our clinic. If you don't have a Webmaster tools account yet, it's pretty simple to obtain. You can get one here.

2) Your website should meet our quality guidelines. This is because we will be using the same guidelines as criteria to select the websites for our analysis. You can review our Webmaster guidelines for any clarification.

The Site Clinic goes live today and submissions will be accepted till the 14th of May 2012.

Please Note: We will be taking in a limited set of sites for complete analysis. Among these, a few representative ones could be chosen as examples to address broad themes and share best practices in our follow-up blog posts.

Posted by Google Search Quality Team

Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

2012-04-25T12:57:00.000+05:30

Just like the Loch Ness Monster, you may have heard the rumors about Google Drive. It turns out, one of the two actually does exist.

Today, we’re introducing Google Drive—a place where you can create, share, collaborate and keep all of your stuff. Whether you’re working with a friend on a joint research project, planning a wedding with your fiancé or tracking a budget with roommates, you can do it in Drive. You can upload and access all of your files, including videos, photos, Google Docs, PDFs and beyond.

With Google Drive, you can:

Create and collaborate. Google Docs is built right into Google Drive, so you can work with others in real time on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Once you choose to share content with others, you can add and reply to comments on anything (PDF, image, video file, etc.) and receive notifications when other people comment on shared items.

Store everything safely and access it anywhere (especially while on the go). All your stuff is just... there. You can access your stuff from anywhere—on the web, in your home, at the office, while running errands and from all of your devices. You can install Drive on your Mac or PC and can download the Drive app to your Android phone or tablet. We’re also working hard on a Drive app for your iOS devices. And regardless of platform, blind users can access Drive with a screen reader.

Search everything. Search by keyword and filter by file type, owner and more. Drive can even recognize text in scanned documents using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. Let’s say you upload a scanned image of an old newspaper clipping. You can search for a word from the text of the actual article. We also use image recognition so that if you drag and drop photos from your Grand Canyon trip into Drive, you can later search for [grand canyon] and photos of its gorges should pop up. This technology is still in its early stages, and we expect it to get better over time.

We know you rely on your files to get work done every day. Drive uses the same infrastructure as other Google Apps services, meaning it also has the same admin tools, security and reliability, including:

Centralized management: New tools available in the Apps control panel for administrators to add or remove storage for individuals or teams of users.
Security: Encryption on data transfer between your browser and our servers, and optional 2-step verification that prevents unauthorized account access by having users sign in with a secure code from their mobile phone.
Data Replication: Simultaneous data replication in multiple data centers, so that in the unlikely event that one data center is unavailable, your files will still be safe and accessible.
Uptime: 99.9% uptime guarantee so you can be confident that your files will be available whenever you need them.
Support: 24/7 support for assistance when you need it.

By the way, the Google Engineering teams in Bangalore and Hyderabad conceptualized and built these centralized management tools, security features and billing systems, so the India team in particular is excited about this launch.

You can get started with 5GB of storage for free—that’s enough to store the high-res photos of your trip to the Mt. Everest, scanned copies of your grandparents’ love letters or a career’s worth of business proposals, and still have space for the novel you’re working on. You can choose to upgrade to 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or even 1TB for $49.99/month. When you upgrade to a paid account, your Gmail account storage will also expand to 25GB.

Drive is built to work seamlessly with your overall Google experience. You can attach photos from Drive to posts in Google+, and soon you’ll be able to attach stuff from Drive directly to emails in Gmail. Drive is also an open platform, so we’re working with many third-party developers so you can do things like send faxes, edit videos and create website mockups directly from Drive. To install these apps, visit the Chrome Web Store—and look out for even more useful apps in the future.

Google Drive is rolling out globally over the next several weeks. If you’re interested in being one of the first people to try Google Drive, visit drive.google.com/start.

This is just the beginning for Google Drive; there’s a lot more to come.

Posted by Sundar Pichai, SVP, Chrome & Apps

G+ SMS

2012-04-20T12:11:00.000+05:30

Google+ helps you share the right things with the right people when you are online, but how about when you are not connected to the Internet? A team of motivated engineers in India realized the importance of connecting you with the right people on Google+ -- regardless of where you are or what kind of device you're on -- and we've introduced Google+ SMS features as a result.

a) Post your updates to Google+ via SMS

b) Receive SMS notifications & reply to them over SMS

To get started, activate your phone number on the Google+ settings page (Supported mobile operators)

When Google+ launched in June last year, SMS features were available only in India and the US. Today we’re pleased to announce the expansion of Google+ SMS to 41 new countries:
Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Bahrain, Benin, Cambodia, Cameroon, Congo (DRC), Cote D'Ivoire, Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, Indonesia, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Liberia, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Morocco, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Thailand, Tunisia, Uganda, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Zambia.

Posted by S. Jeyashankher, Software Engineer

Google Art Project launches with Museums in Delhi

2012-04-10T08:36:00.000+05:30

I am very excited to announce the launch of Google Art Project in India. This launch allows users across the world to view artwork collection supported by 2 museums in New Delhi - National Gallery of Modern Art and National Museum, from the comfort of their homes at www.googleartproject.com. We hope to add many more such museums in time and welcome partnerships from museums across India to participate in this program. Sign up form is here.

Globally, we have launched 151 cultural institutions in 41 countries with 30,000 artworks from 6,000 artists.

Users from anywhere can find excellent portalist from Kerala, Raja Ravi Varma’s oil paintings during the 1890s to Jamini Roy’s inspiration from tribal and folk culture that connects towns to villages. Also check out the miniatures from the early Chola Art at the National Museum - outstanding bronze image of Nataraja in chatura-tandava posture from Tiruvarangulam and cosmic dance of Lord Shiva symbolizing fivefold aspects of Divine control of the universe namely; creation, preservation, destruction, illusion and grace.

Global collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery in London, the Palace of Versailles in France, the White House in Washington DC, the collection of the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar and many more. Don’t forget to check out the museum view located on the left bottom panel of the site.

The platform gives you a fun and unique way to interact with art and we hope this inspires you to visit the real thing. Users all over the world can now interact with art in a way that was never possible before - brush level strokes of paintings, virtual tour of the museums and a feature that allows you to create your own collection to share with your friends and family.

Here are a few things in the Art Project that you might enjoy:

Using tools called Explore and Discover, you can find artworks by period, artist or type of artwork, displaying works from different museums around the world.
Google+ and Hangouts are integrated on the site, enabling you to create engaging personal galleries.
Street View images are displayed in finer quality. A specially designed Street View “trolley” took 360-degree images of the interior of selected galleries which were then stitched together, enabling smooth navigation of more than 385 rooms within the museums. You can also explore the gallery interiors directly from within Street View in Google Maps.
We have 46 artworks available with our “gigapixel” photo capturing technology, photographed in extraordinary detail using super high resolution so you can study details of the brushwork and patina that would be impossible to see with the naked eye.
An enhanced My Gallery feature lets you select any of the 30,000 artworks—along with your favorite details—to build your own personalized gallery. You can add comments to each painting and share the whole collection with friends and family. (It’s an ideal tool for students.)

We’re incredibly excited about this project—it’s our first step toward making great art more accessible, and we hope to add more museums and works of art in time.

Posted by Kiran Bapna, Principal New Business Development

A New Way to Multitask

2012-04-01T09:03:00.000+05:30

On December 9, 1968, Douglas Engelbart rocked the computing world with The Mother of All Demos. One of the many advancements Engelbart discussed was the creation of a simple, intuitive pointing device that would allow you to manipulate a cursor on a screen with the movement of your hand. The world met the mouse.

Before the mouse, the primary way to interact with a computer was to type a command, wait for a response, and type a second command. The ability to coordinate between the movement of a marker on the screen and a flick of the wrist was truly revolutionary, and has transformed the way we interface with our machines today.

However, for decades, the full power of the mouse has been limited. While we’ve been mousing away with one hand, our other hand has often been idle. As information has moved faster and faster, our mousing capacity has stayed the same.

On the Chrome team, we’ve been working to address this problem. Today, we’d like to announce a new way to get twice as much web from your browser. We call it Multitask Mode.

Multitask Mode lets you have access to multiple mice at the same time, so you can make a chess move while you watch a dance move, or draw a horse while you draw on a friend for relationship advice.

Chrome can handle as many mice, touchpads, styli, joysticks, trackballs, and other pointing devices as you can plug into your computer, so you and your friends can browse dozens of sites at the same time.

Try it out and let us know what you think!

Posted by Glen Murphy, Designer and Stylus Stylist

Here is your chance to become a Bollywood Star!

2012-03-24T08:48:00.000+05:30

T-Series launches a star hunt for the lead pair in Aashiqui 2 (sequel to the 90s super hit Aashiqui) on YouTube

It does not get bigger than this. If you’ve always dreamed of becoming a Bollywood star, here is your chance. Starting today - Vishesh Films and T-Series bring to you ‘Aashiqui 2 Star Hunt’ on YouTube. For the first time ever, the lead pair for a mainstream Bollywood film will be selected on YouTube. All you need to do is log on to: www.youtube.com/aashiqui2 and upload a 2 minute video from a list of scenes and songs on the Aashiqui 2 channel. Your audition videos will be screened by a Creative Jury, Producer/Director of the film and will subsequently go for Public Voting on the Aashiqui 2 channel.

When Vishesh Films & T-Series released Aashiqui, 22 years ago – it became one of the most successful musical blockbusters in Indian cinema. It gave movie goers and music lovers, music that people still love to listen to. Carrying forward the spirit of Aashiqui from Director Mahesh Bhatt & Producer Gulshan Kumar are Director Mohit Suri and Bhushan Kumar from T-Series.

You can also stay updated with all the news on Aashiqui 2 on the Official Google Plus Page of T-Series.
You can also join the Hangout on Google plus with Director Mahesh Bhatt on this page on Monday, 26th March, at 11:30 am.

This is a fantastic opportunity for aspiring and deserving artists to audition on YouTube and get a chance to be the Next Big Thing in Bollywood! Auditions Open Now!

Posted by Nikhil Rungta, Country Head Marketing Google India, recently watched Aashiqui Enact Scene 1

19,000+ episodes of Indian TV on YouTube Shows

2012-03-16T09:41:00.000+05:30

[Cross posted from the Youtube blog]

India is one of world’s largest producers of TV shows. With more than 400 terrestrial and local channels available, Indians often face the challenging question: What am I going to watch?

The good news is that we increasingly don’t have to worry about when to watch. Over the last few years, major Indian broadcasters such as Sony Entertainment Television, Colors, ImagineTV, Star India, and VikatanTV have been bringing their shows to YouTube so that you can watch them whenever you want.

Now that our Indian TV partners offer more than 19,000 full episodes of 300 programs in six different languages (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Gujarati, and Punjabi), we wanted to offer our Indian viewers an updated Shows page at youtube.com/shows to help you better follow shows you love and discover new favorites. For the rest of the world, you can still find the shows through youtube.com/shows/other-languages.

You’ll find programs into genres like drama and comedy, as well as the latest and top watched episodes featured on the page. Missed the last episode of Bade Acche Lagte Hai? It’ll be right there in the channel waiting for you. If you’re looking for a few good places to start, check out popular shows like Balika Vadhu, Ramayan, CID, Devon Ke Dev...Mahadev, Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah and Thendral.

These 19,000+ episodes are just a start, so we hope we can keep delivering more and more content that viewers across India—and around the world—want to see.

Posted by Ajith Rao, Software Engineer, recently watched “Adaalat - Episode 104,” and Gowri Ramkumar, Technical Account Manager, recently watched “Kuch toh log Kahenge - episode 118.”

Google’s new Privacy Policy

2012-03-01T12:08:00.000+05:30

[Cross posted from the Google Official Blog]

Our updated Privacy Policy takes effect today, March 1. As you use our products one thing will be clear: it’s the same Google experience that you’re used to, with the same controls.

And because we’re making these changes, over time we’ll be able to improve our products in ways that help our users get the most from the web.

While we’ve undertaken the most extensive user education campaign in our history to explain the coming changes, we know there has been a fair amount of chatter and confusion.

Here are a few important points to bear in mind:

Our Privacy Policy is now much easier to understand.

We’ve included the key parts from more than 60 product-specific notices into our main Google Privacy Policy—so there’s no longer any need to be your own mini search engine if you want to work out what’s going on. Our Privacy Policy now explains, for the vast majority of our services, what data we’re collecting and how we may use it, in plain language.

Our Privacy Policy will enable us to build a better, more intuitive user experience across Google for signed-in users.

If you’re signed in to Google, you expect our products to work really beautifully together. For example, if you’re working on Google Docs and you want to share it with someone on Gmail, you want their email right there ready to use. Our privacy policies have always allowed us to combine information from different products with your account—effectively using your data to provide you with a better service. However, we’ve been restricted in our ability to combine your YouTube and Search histories with other information in your account. Our new Privacy Policy gets rid of those inconsistencies so we can make more of your information available to you when using Google.

So in the future, if you do frequent searches for Jamie Oliver, we could recommend Jamie Oliver videos when you’re looking for recipes on YouTube—or we might suggest ads for his cookbooks when you’re on other Google properties.

Our privacy controls aren’t changing.

The new policy doesn’t change any existing privacy settings or how any personal information is shared outside of Google. We aren’t collecting any new or additional information about users. We won’t be selling your personal data. And we will continue to employ industry-leading security to keep your information safe.

If you don’t think information sharing will improve your experience, you can use our privacy tools to do things like edit or turn off your search history and YouTube history, control the way Google tailors ads to your interests and browse the web “incognito” using Chrome. You can use services like Search, Maps and YouTube if you are not signed in. You can even separate your information into different accounts, since we don’t combine personal information across them. And we’re committed to data liberation, so if you want to take your information elsewhere you can.

We’ll continue to look for ways to make it simpler for you to understand and control how we use the information you entrust to us. We build Google for you, and we think these changes will make our services even better.

Posted by Alma Whitten, Director of Privacy, Product and Engineering

Four new Indian languages on YouTube: Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu

2012-02-24T16:02:00.000+05:30

[Cross-posted from The Youtube Blog]

YouTube opened its doors in India in May 2008, and since then we’ve been working to make YouTube accessible for the entire Indian population — and its 30 regional languages. Beyond Hindi and English, we’ve added Urdu, Marathi, Bengali, and Tamil over the years, and today we’re welcoming four more to YouTube.

Now you can navigate the site in Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu, which are spoken by almost 200 million Indians. This also brings the total of available languages on YouTube to 58.

For Telugu, we have more than 100 films of Tollywood cinema, as well as partners like vegetarian cooking channel Gayatrivantillu who make videos for the web and have a growing global audience. For Kannada, Shemaroo Kannada and Anand Audio bring you music, drama, comedy and more to your homepage guide. Fans of Malayalam cinema should check out channels like Metro Matinee Videos and Hungama Malayalam. When it comes to news, YouTube’s partners like TV 9 provide news in both Kannada and Gujarati, and TheTimesKerala offers clips in Malayalam.

Gujarati	Kannada

Malayalam	Telugu

We hope this helps even more of you enjoy channels on YouTube in your native language, as we work to make the site accessible around the world.

Posted by Aditi Rajwanshi, YouTube India partner manager, recently watched "Chutney for Idli, Dosa, Upma, Vada etc."

From snowflakes to surfactants: meet the YouTube Space Lab regional winners

2012-02-22T14:41:00.000+05:30

At the end of January, we invited you to choose your favorite YouTube Space Lab experiment ideas from sixty finalist teams, and today we have our winners! More than 100,000 of you cast your votes that combined with the scores from our panel of judges to decide the regional winners for the final stage of the competition.

Here at Google India, we’re particularly happy to announce that the Asia Pacific regional winner in the 17-18 category is Sachin Kukke from Bangalore. His experiment focuses on the thermal conductivity of ferrofluids (aka liquid magnets).

Find out the other winners below, and of course, you can meet them all on the Space Lab Channel.

14 - 16 year old regional winning teams:

Asia Pacific region: Is space too cold for life to exist? by Patrick Zeng & Derek Chan from New Zealand
Europe, Middle East and Africa region: Could weightless liquids be the key to better gadgets? by Laura Calvo & María Vilas from Spain
The Americas region: Could alien superbugs cure disease on Earth? by Dorothy Chen & Sara Ma from U.S.A.

17 - 18 year old regional winning teams:

Asia Pacific region: Could liquid magnets take us deeper into space? by Sachin Kukke from India
Europe, Middle East and Africa region: Can you teach an old spider new tricks? by Amr Mohamed from Egypt
The Americas region: Could a snowflake unlock the mysteries of the universe? by Emerald Bresnahan from U.S.A

The six regional winning teams will travel to Washington, D.C., where we’ll announce the two global winners (one team from each age group). These two winners will have their experiments performed 250 miles above Earth aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and live streamed on YouTube as part of a global event celebrating science and space. While in Washington, all the teams will take part in a series of activities to honor their achievements, including the opportunity to experience weightlessness on a ZERO-G flight.

Space Lab invited budding scientists to submit a YouTube video describing an idea for an experiment that could be carried out aboard the ISS. The channel, which serves as a launch pad for discovering great space and science videos on YouTube, has received more than 50 million views worldwide throughout the course of the competition. This week we’re uploading interviews with the winners in their hometowns, so subscribe to the channel to keep up to date with all the latest from here on Earth!

Posted by Zahaan Bharmal, YouTube Space Lab lead, recently watched the “ESA Education (English)” playlist.

Introducing the Women Entrepreneurs on the Web Initiative

2012-02-01T13:00:00.001+05:30

At Google, we strive to build programs for each of our markets that enable our users to further their businesses with the help of technology and the online medium. Everywhere Google operates, we are thinking about how to best support diversity and inclusion in a way that is both locally relevant and globally impactful. We’re very excited to announce the launch of the Women Entrepreneurs on the Web (WEOW) program in India, as a targeted business diversity program for women entrepreneurs.

When we came up with this idea, we started by speaking to a large number of women entrepreneurs across various demographics and with organisations that work with women entrepreneurs. We soon realised that they were true entrepreneurs and clearly not afraid to try new things, yet many were unaware of various products that can be used to leverage the full potential of the internet including some Google products and services, such as Google+, AdWords and Apps for Enterprise. In fact, many of them didn’t even have an online presence. This led us to crystallising the idea into a program to increase the reach of technology with this community. The large number of women entrepreneurs in India made it a natural decision for us to pilot this initiative here.

The Women Entrepreneurs on the Web Program aims to help women-owned businesses grow their online presence. The program will provide women entrepreneurs support on using various web-based technologies in their day to day business while increasing their outreach to their customer base. The program is a 5 circle approach designed specially to cater to women entrepreneurs with varied degrees of online presence and expertise. The program starts with building an online presence and moves towards collaborating effectively, connecting with customers, promoting their organisations to then tracking and optimising their online presence. We believe that entrepreneurs will be at varied stages and can enter this program through any of these circles.

As part of our launch event at Google Hyderabad, Yolanda Mangolini, Head of Diversity and Inclusion at Google, spent time with 30 women entrepreneurs from from various national organisations like FIWE, COWE, TIE. During this meet, she highlighted the initiatives taken by Google for empowering women and how Google aspires to build an organisation that reflects the globally diverse audience.

Diversity has a long history at Google, starting with our founders and original employees who knew it was the right way to build the company. This program is a great addition to our other successful programs in India targeted for women, like the Google Anita Borg India Memorial Scholarships, Grace Hopper Celebrations and several outreach programs run by the Women@Google employee group.

For updates on WEOW India, go to our website (www.womenentrepreneursontheweb.com), check out our Youtube channel or add our Google+ Page to your circles.

Posted by Keerthana Mohan, Diversity and Inclusion Manager, APAC & Pooja Srinivas, Co-lead for Women@Google India

Matt Cutts HangsOut with India Webmasters

2012-01-25T12:32:00.001+05:30

Hello Webmasters!

Matt Cutts is in town this week spending time with a group of Googlers involved in webmaster outreach. Matt would like to interact more with the local webmaster community, so we’re going to try a Google+ Hangout later today. Matt is a Distinguished Software Engineer heading the Google Webspam Team, and is known for talking to webmasters about how to make Google-friendly sites. To learn more about Matt, visit his blog.

If you’d like to watch the Hangout, head to Matt’s Google+ profile at 2 p.m. IST today. You can ask Matt questions in the Google+ post for the hangout, or tweet @mattcutts with the hashtag #askmatt.

See you there!

Google Search Quality Team

Sixty YouTube Space Lab Finalists Announced: Vote Now For Your Favorites

2012-01-20T15:33:00.000+05:30

[Cross Posted from the Youtube Bog]

A few months ago we set 14-18 year olds the bold challenge to design a science experiment that could be performed by NASA aboard the International Space Station, something that has traditionally been the preserve of qualified astronauts and scientists. Coming up with a suitable idea required huge imagination, passion and scientific curiosity, which is why we were thrilled with your response—we received a total of 2,000 video submissions from students in more than 80 countries!

Expert scientists helped us check and rank all of the entries, and today we are very proud to announce the sixty finalists. All of their submissions can now be viewed on the YouTube.com/SpaceLab Channel, and from January 17–24, you can vote for the ones you want to win. We need your help selecting the six regional winners, and ultimately the two global winners that will have their experiments performed 250 miles above Earth and live streamed on YouTube. Start voting today.

Remember, the channel is also a launchpad to some of the best space and science videos on YouTube. We’ve already received more than 39 million combined video views worldwide and we’re adding new videos and playlists regularly, like this new playlist about the mysteries of the Red Planet. Subscribe to the channel to keep up to date with all the latest content.

Didn’t make it to the final round? Check out the newly launched Google Science Fair 2012 for another chance to enter an amazing global science competition.

Posted by Zahaan Bharmal, YouTube Space Lab lead , who recently watched “Living in Space: 225,000 Miles Above Earth.”

Search, plus Your World

2012-01-11T14:30:00.001+05:30

[Cross-posted from The Official Google Blog]

Google Search has always been about finding the best results for you. Sometimes that means results from the public web, but sometimes it means your personal content or things shared with you by people you care about. These wonderful people and this rich personal content is currently missing from your search experience. Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met. Today, we’re changing that by bringing your world, rich with people and information, into search.

Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more. But clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to... all from one search box.

We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction by introducing three new features:

Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.

Together, these features combine to create Search plus Your World. Search is simply better with your world in it, and we’re just getting started.

Personal Results
Say you’re looking for a vacation destination. You can of course search the web, but what if you want to learn from the experiences your friends have had on their vacations? Just as in real life, your friends’ experiences are often so much more meaningful to you than impersonal content on the web. With your world in search, you can find:

Google+ posts. You can find relevant Google+ posts from friends talking about an amazing trip they just took, whether they’ve shared privately with you or publicly. You’ll find links shared by your friends, such as activities, restaurants and other things they enjoyed on their trip.
Photos. You can find beautiful vacation photos from your friends right in your search results page. You can also find your own private photos from Google+ and Picasa, based on captions, comments and album title.

Personal Results: a family story
As a child, my favorite fruit was Chikoo, which is exceptionally sweet and tasty. A few years back when getting a family dog, we decided to name our sweet little puppy after my favorite fruit. Over the years we have privately shared many pictures of Chikoo (our dog) with our family. To me, the query [chikoo] means two very sweet and different things, and today’s improvements give me the magical experience of finding both the Chikoos I love, right in the results page.

This is search that truly knows me, and gives me a result page that only I can see. And while I get a nice mix of personal results with results from the web, I can also click the link at the top of the results page (red arrow) for the option to search only within my world.

Profiles in Search
Every day, there are hundreds of millions of searches for people. Sometimes, it’s hard to find the person you’re looking for. Once you do find him or her, there’s no quick way for you to actually interact. Starting today, you’ll have meaningful ways to connect with people instantly, right from the search results.

Now, typing just the first few letters of your friend’s name brings up a personalized profile prediction in autocomplete. Selecting a predicted profile takes you to a results page for your friend, which includes information from their Google+ profile and relevant web results that may be related to them. And you can have this personal experience instantaneously, thanks to Google Instant. So when I search for [ben smith], I now find my dear friend Ben every time, instead of the hundreds of other Ben Smiths out there (no offense to all of them!).

In addition, you’ll find profile autocomplete predictions for various prominent people from Google+, such as high-quality authors from our authorship pilot program.

Once you select that profile, if you’re a signed-in Google+ user, you’ll also see a button to add them to your circles right on your search results page.

People and Pages
As I mentioned earlier, behind most queries are communities. Starting today, if you search for a topic like [music] or [baseball], you might see prominent people who frequently discuss this topic on Google+ appearing on the right-hand side of the results page. You can connect with them on Google+, strike up meaningful conversations and discover entire communities in a way that simply wasn’t possible before.

Unprecedented security, transparency and control
When it comes to security and privacy, we set a high bar for Search plus Your World. Since some of the information you’ll now find in search results, including Google+ posts and private photos, is already secured by SSL encryption on Google+, we have decided that the results page should also have the same level of security and privacy protection. That's part of why we were the first major search engine to turn on search via SSL by default for signed-in users last year. This means when you’re signed in to Google, your search results—including your private content—are protected by the same high standards of encryption as your messages in Gmail.

We also want to be transparent about how our features work and give you control over how to use them. With today’s changes, we provide interface elements and control settings like those you’ll find in Google+. For example, personal results are clearly marked as Public, Limited or Only you. Additionally, people in your results are clearly marked with the Google+ circle they are in, or as suggested connections.

We’re also introducing a prominent new toggle on the upper right of the results page where you can see what your search results look like without personal content. With a single click, you can see an unpersonalized view of search results.

That means no results from your friends, no private information and no personalization of results based on your Web History. This toggle button works for an individual search session, but you can also make this the default in your Search Settings. We provide separate control in Search Settings over other contextual signals we use, including location and language.

That's unprecedented transparency and control over personal search results.

A beautiful journey begins
Search plus Your World will become available over the next few days to people who are signed in and searching on https://www.google.com in English.

While there may be 7 billion people and 197 million square miles on Earth, a septillion stars and a trillion webpages, we spend our short, precious lives living in a particular town, with particular friends and family, orbiting a single star and relying on a tiny slice of the world’s information. Our dream is to have technology enable everyone to experience the richness of all their information and people around them.

We named our company after the mathematical number googol as an aspiration toward indexing the countless answers on webpages, but that’s only part of the picture. The other part is people, and that’s what Search plus Your World is all about.

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

What were we watching this year? Let’s rewind 2011.

2011-12-21T14:37:00.001+05:30

In India:

Bollywood ruled the charts with Shah Rukh Khan Don 2 Trailer being the most watched video
Jennifer Lopez - On The floor Ft Pitbull piped Salman Khan Dhinka Chika Song as the most watched music video of 2011
Kolaveri Di became the fastest rising music video of the year with over 25 million views within a month of its release

One hundred years into the future, when our great-grandkids look back to what was capturing the world’s imagination on YouTube in 2011, what will they make of us? Will they still be delighted by babbling babies? Will they still be “so excited” about the weekend? And will they be any closer to understanding the mystery of the space-traveling toaster pastry cat?

Check out YouTube.com/Rewind for a timeline of this year's most popular videos and events and to see what the world watched in 2011.

Today, we rewind through the videos and channels that absorbed our collective global attention this year. To compile these lists, we looked at global view counts of popular videos uploaded throughout this year, and, in some instances, we aggregated views across multiple versions of the same video. 2011 was a year of amazing new channels and new stars being discovered, awesome creativity, and of course, Rebecca Black. It was also a year of powerful news stories playing out on YouTube, as people witnessed and documented uprisings and natural disasters, touching personal moments and moments of protest.

In total, there were more than 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) playbacks on YouTube this year (yep, count ‘em, 12 zeroes). That’s about 140 views for every person on the earth. More than twice as many stars as in the Milky Way.

In India, YouTube users couldn’t get enough of the stars on the big screen, as bollywood ruled the charts on YouTube in India for the year 2011. From movie trailers, popular movie songs to nursery rhymes India enjoyed them all on YouTube.

In India, the top 10 most-watched YouTube videos of 2011 were:

And the top 10 most watched music videos from major music labels were:

The most-watched YouTube videos of 2011 reflect the people, places and events that captured our attention and imagination throughout the year.

Globally, the most-watched YouTube community videos were:

And globally, the most-watched music videos on YouTube were:

In India, some highlights from other categories include:

Kolaveri Di became the fastest rising music video of the year in India, garnering over 25 million views within a month of its release on YouTube
Haal E Dil - from ‘shraddharockin’ - topped the most watched user generated video of the year
Teri Meri - "Bodyguard (2011) - was the most watched bollywood music video of the year
Jennifer Lopez - On The Floor ft. Pitbull - was the most watched international music video of the year
KBC: 2011- Episode 40 -20th Oct 2011 - Full Episode - was the most watched popular TV show - video of the year

So to all of you who picked up a guitar and sang a love song, held your camera phone high above a rioting crowd, danced along to Friday, or just forgot the webcam was on, thank you. You make YouTube what it is, and we can’t wait to hear your stories next year.

Posted by Kevin Allocca, YouTube Trends Manager, recently watched “Miracle on 42nd Street.”

Bharat ki Khoj: Top Google Searches of 2011

2011-12-16T12:31:00.000+05:30

Why is it that we Indians search the web? Whether it is to find a job, follow the world of politics, Bollywood or cricket, stock updates or to send flowers to a friend, listen to music or just to hang out .... we come to Google with something on our mind.

As the year comes to an end, we look back at the searches in 2011 to compose the year’s Zeitgeist—the spirit of the time. With Zeitgeist, we look at the most popular and the fastest rising terms—the terms with the highest growth in 2011—in many categories across India to give you a glimpse into the hottest trends and topics. From searching for information on local politics, the Lokpal Bill and Aadhar cards, to following news on the Japan earthquake and Osama Bin Laden’s death, people turned to Google to learn more about what was happening in India and around the world.

In 2011, Bharat started coming online. It has been a coming-of-age year for the Indian internet, with young Indians following anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare and making him the fastest rising people query of 2011. IBPS (Institute of Banking Personnel Selection) made a surprise appearance as one of the fastest rising searches, showing Indians’ interest in government jobs. Indian Railways continued to be a popular search term, with Indians getting online to book tickets and searching for train timings and other railway-related information.

On a lighter note, Poonam Pandey created a frenzy on the web with a promise she could not fulfill. Katrina Kaif continued her reign in Bollywood as the most searched celebrity in India for the fourth year in a row. 2011 also saw the Khans ruling the web with their movies Bodyguard and Ra One in the top two positions, while movies from contemporaries Aamir Khan (Delhi Belly) and Ajay Devgan (Singham) also made a mark in the top searched movies list.

In a country where cricket is a religion, it comes as no surprise to see the Indian net buzzing with excitement with the historic World Cup win, IPL and Sachin Tendulkar’s campaign for that elusive century of centuries.

While social networking sites featured on the ‘Top Searches’ list, we also saw a sudden spurt in the use of the free SMS website way2SMS, a new entry in this year’s list.

And my personal favorite is the only tech personality to make it to the top 10.. Steve Jobs, who was one of the pillars of computing and internet age and will be missed by India’s netizens.

Fastest rising searches	Fastest rising people	Top Searches
Facebook IBPS Google+ World Cup 2011 Bodyguard Ra.one Anna Hazare IPL 2011 Poonam Pandey Ready	Anna Hazare Poonam Pandey Steve Jobs Anushka Sharma Salman Khan Justin Bieber Kajal Agarwal Katrina Kaif Vijay Mallya Aishwarya Rai	Facebook YouTube Gmail Yahoomail Google Yahoo IRCTC Rediffmail Indian Railways way2sms

Top Searched People	Top Searched Movies	Top Searched events/news
Katrina Kaif Anna Hazare Salman Khan Poonam Pandey Justin Bieber Aishwarya Rai Sachin Tendulkar Kareena Kapoor Steve Jobs Priyanka Chopra	Bodyguard Ra One Harry Potter Delhi Belly Singham Ready Mankatha Transformers 3 Dookudu Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara	IPL World Cup 2011 CBSE result 2011 Diwali Lokpal bill Japan earthquake Aadhar card Osama Bin Laden Pakistan F1

Beginning today, you can head over to our Year-End Google Zeitgeist website (http://www.googlezeitgeist.com/#en/) to see the top global searches of 2011, and additional top searches in more than forty countries.

We created these lists and graphs using a combination of several tools that give insight into global, regional, past and present search trends on an aggregated level. Google Insights for Search, a publicly available tool that displays relative search volume across geographies, time periods and queries, informed many lists and graphs found on this year's Year-End Zeitgeist page.

With billions of searches conducted globally on Google each year, there are a plethora of search trends based on location, season and vertical, and our Year-End Zeitgeist cannot possibly capture them all. If you want to come up with your own lists or graphs, we encourage you to play around with our public Google Insights for Search tool to generate your own "Zeitgeist" lists for 2011.

Thanks to everyone out there for searching on Google -- and here's to more searching in 2012!

Posted by Lalitesh Katragadda, Country Head - India Products

Mapping made easier with the new Google Map Maker

2011-12-15T16:06:00.000+05:30

[Cross-posted from The Google LatLong Blog]

With 2012 approaching, we're getting a head start on our New Year's resolution to shed some excess weight and improve our overall appearance. You may have seen our ongoing efforts to improve the look, feel, and user experience across many other Google products to date. And with Google Map Maker available in the United States, Canada, and more than 180 other regions, it's time for another makeover. Today, we’re revealing a new version of Google Map Maker to help users map the places they know best and make their hometowns sparkle on Google Maps.

With Map Maker, you can easily help ensure that the changing world around you is accurately reflected on the map. Add your favorite gift shop, the nearest tree farm, or even the golf course where you once got that hole in one. It’s also easier to mark the best route to Grandma’s house and draw better buildings with courtyards and crisper corners. The options are endless when it comes to mapping the places you know and love. Once approved, your contributions will appear on Google Maps, Google Earth and Google Maps for mobile for all the world to see.

You don’t have to be an expert to start using Google Map Maker. High school student and Eagle Scout Tommy Bruce is a mapping superstar who finds mapping fun, fulfilling, and a simple way to help those in his community have the best, most comprehensive information possible. He started by mapping bike trails in his hometown of Mooresville, North Carolina and is now on an exchange program in Puebla, Mexico, mapping unmarked rivers that run through town! After witnessing Tommy’s accomplishments firsthand at the U.S. Geo User Summit, even his mother Margaret began thinking of places that she’s eager to put on the map. Why not make your New Year’s resolution to improve the map for millions of people? Start here.

Posted by Kaushik Sridharan, Software Engineer

Giving back in 2011

2011-12-14T14:23:00.000+05:30

Supporting great non-profit organisations doing work in India

As the holiday season approaches we thought it was a good moment to update you on
some grants we're making to support education, technology and the fight against modern
day slavery.
In India, eight of the selected grantee organisations will receive funding to aid them in the
valuable work they are doing across the country.

Fighting slavery and human trafficking

Modern day slavery is a multi-billion dollar industry that impacts the lives of around 27
million people. So we're funding a number of groups that are working to tackle the
problem. For instance, in India, International Justice Mission (IJM), along with The BBC
World Service Trust, Action Aid and Aide et Action, are forming a new coalition. These
organizations will work on the ground with governments to stop slave labor by identifying
the ring masters, documenting abuse, freeing individuals and providing them with therapy
as well as job training. Our support will also help expand the reach of tools like the
powerful Slavery Footprint calculator and Polaris Project’s National Trafficking Hotline.

STEM and girls’ education

Science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) open up great opportunities for young
people so we've decided to fund 16 great programs in this area. These include
Boston-based Citizen Schools and Generating Genius in the U.K, both of which work to
help to expand the horizons of underprivileged youngsters. In total, our grants will provide
enhanced STEM education for more than 3 million students.

In addition, we're supporting girls’ education in the developing world. By giving girls an
education, you not only improve her opportunities, but that of her whole family. The
African Leadership Academy provides merit scholarships to promising young women
across the continent, and the Afghan Institute of Learning offers literacy classes to
women and girls in rural Afghanistan. Groups like these will use our funds to educate
more than 10,000 girls in developing countries.

Empowerment through technology

We've all been wowed by the entrepreneurial spirit behind the 15 awards in this category,
all of whom are using the web and open source programming to connect communities and
improve access to information. Vittana, for instance, helps lenders offer loans to students
in the developing world who have have a 99 percent repayment rate--potentially doubling
or tripling a recipient's earning power. Code for America enables the web industry to share
its skills with the public sector by developing projects that improve transparency and
encourage civic engagement on a mass scale. And Switchboard is working with local
mobile providers to help African health care workers create networks and communicate
for free.

To learn more about these organizations and how you can get involved, visit our Google
Gives Back 2011 site and take a look at this video:

These grants, which total $40 million, are only part of our annual philanthropic efforts.
Over the course of the year, Google provided more than $115 million in funding to various
nonprofit organizations and academic institutions around the world; our in-kind support
(programs like Google Grants and Google Apps for Education that offer free products and
services to eligible organizations) came to more than $1 billion, and our annual
company-wide GoogleServe event and related programs enabled individual Googlers to
donate more than 40,000 hours of their own volunteer time.

As 2011 draws to a close, I’m inspired by this year’s grantees and look forward to seeing
their world-changing work in 2012.

Posted by Shona Brown, SVP Google.org

Jagriti Yatra 2011 - Awakening the Entrepreneurial spirit

2011-12-12T15:29:00.000+05:30

Yatra means “journey” in Sanskrit. It is a journey one takes to achieve a higher cause or spread a message. Jagriti Yatra is a journey of awakening, a journey where young entrepreneurs awaken to issues and challenges of Middle India (smaller cities and villages) and seek solutions to the same. Conducted by Jagriti Sewa Sansthan a non profit, Jagriti Yatra consists of 8,500 kilometer long annual train journey of 15 days traversing cities and villages across India. The Yatra starts in Mumbai on December 25th 2011 and ends on January 8th 2012. During the Yatra, selected young budding entrepreneurs from Middle India will get mentored and trained by role models who themselves have been successful entrepreneurs. At Google entrepreneurial behavior is highly desired and encouraged and has been the foundation of many products and successes. And Google is very happy to associate with this unique initiative.

India is going through an exciting phase and the enormous economic growth in the cities now needs to trickle down to the interiors of India. Jagriti’s mission of awakening the spirit of enterprise in India’s youth can go a long way in addressing Middle India’s challenges and problems. Jagriti’s focus on solving problems in the areas of Healthcare, Agro-bussiness, Water, Energy are very relevant and urgent.

Jagriti will use Google’s platforms like YouTube to bring the experience of the 15 day train journey, to millions of others by creating a dedicated channel On YouTube www.youtube.com/jagriti. Jagriti Yatra will also use Google SMS Channel and Google+ to continuously disseminate information about the Yatra. Google will also extend its support by facilitating internet connectivity to the train through wi-fi.

We are excited to participate in an event that can have significant impact on the country for many years to come. Previous Yatras have led to the creation of 130 enterprises. We are eagerly waiting to see what exciting ideas and enterprises come out of this year’s Yatra. I hope you are as excited about the Yatra as we are. Please spread the message, share the link and add it to your status message. We are waiting to get on the train and experience the Yatra first hand.

For Yatra updates, including registration for the journey log on to http://www.jagritiyatra.com/

Posted by Adhi Kesarla, Principal, New Business Development, India
Kushagra Shrivastava, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Virender Sehwag Live and Exclusive on Google+, Today @2:30PM

2011-12-12T13:42:00.000+05:30

Virender Sehwag will be hanging out today 2.30 PM IST on Google+ to thank his fans for their overwhelming support and wishes on his glorious double century. Sehwag shared his double ton celebration and posted an exclusive video on his Google+ profile earlier.

Sehwag along with Dhoni, Gambhir and other top cricketers of India have found a whole new way to interact with their fans through Google+. In fact Dhoni shared his circle of cricketers making it easier for them to connect with all their favourite stars at one go! Go ahead and add that circle to yours and stay connected with the entire cricket team at one go!

Check out the posts between the cricket stars, candid conversations with their fans, and their plan before the big Australian Tour on the 26th of December. Fans can add all the top cricketers to their circles; Harbhajan, Ishant Sharma, Sreesanth, Murali Kartik, Amit Mishra, Manoj Tiwary, Umesh Yadav, Iqbal Abdullah, Sudeep Tyagi, Ashoke Dinda, Varun Aaron, Sarbjeet Ladda and RP Singh.

Don’t forget to add Sehwag to your circle and be ready for a face to face chat with Nawab of Najafgarh.

Posted by Guneet Singh, Lead Consumer Marketing.

Google Internet Bus Enters West Bengal

2011-12-05T11:06:00.000+05:30

While Kolkata has 30 lakh Internet users, the rest of West Bengal is predominantly offline. Out of all the Internet users across India more than 60% hail from non-metro cities and small towns.

After a very successful run in Bihar where close to 10 lakh people visited the Internet Bus, we are now entering the Bengali heartland. The bus will visit Kolkata, Durgapur, Asansol, Kharagpur, Uluberia, Chandannagar, Behrampore, Haldia, Bankura & Puruliya during its two month long stay in West Bengal.

The project has enjoyed success and interest among the people of 11 states, covering more than 2500 locations and touching the lives of more than 65,00,000 Indians across 130 towns. Surveys have indicated that more than 20,00,000 people have gone online for the first time after visiting the Google Internet Bus.

The bus will showcase informative content in English, Hindi and Bengali in addition to the basic familiarization on using services like search, email, social networking and online maps. The bus will also showcase how Internet services can be used on a mobile device. We will also continue to engage cyber café owners and school teachers with an aim to build local advocacy for this powerful medium.

Users across India can follow the bus through its journey, see pictures & videos,
and join online communities by simply visiting http://www.google.co.in/internetbus

Posted by Nishant Nair, Program Manager, Google India