Wary of China,Google double clicks on India’s potential

Coffee mugs and family pictures adorn the workstations of those glued to their computer screens. A Manchester United flag is draped across the back of a chair. It is casual workplace epitomised.

Google’s recent run-in with the Chinese government has turned the spotlight on its India operations. Like Google,many multinational corporations are looking at India with renewed focus.

“For Google,India is in a beautiful spot,” says Vinay Goel,Google India country head,products. “It has the world’s second largest number of mobile subscribers at 500 million and fifth largest base of internet users”. Goel,an American of Indian origin,appears unruffled by his company’s face-off in China.

Typically,most of the content on Google’s properties such as Blogger,Facebook,YouTube and Orkut are user-generated. In China,that means heavy-handed government censoring.

In India too,Google censors search results to conform to law and local sensibilities. For instance,pre-natal sex testing clinic ads are banned. Politically-sensitive user-generated content about Congress president Sonia Gandhi,Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray and B R Ambedkar,on Orkut and YouTube has been summarily removed. But the environment Google faces in India is very different compared with China,says Goel. “Here,the level of transparency is very high.”

Still,China is an important territory for Google,where it commands nearly a third of the market. China’s market size — 330 million internet users — dwarfs India’s 70 million. But only 5 per cent of India is online,so market potential is virtually endless. Google commands an overwhelming market share in this country,not just for its search engine but also networking and other businesses.

The importance of India as a Google base is underscored by one statistic — the country has the second largest presence of Googlers after the US. Its four offices in Bangalore,Hyderabad,Gurgaon and Mumbai employ 2,000 and span R&D and sales.

In Bangalore,Google has an engineering and R&D focus. It is where India-centric products are conceived,developed and then taken global. One such product,Google’s Map Maker was born out of the emblematic Indian problem of finding accurate driving directions. “New buildings sprout up overnight,two-way streets suddenly turn one-way,” says Lalit Katragudda,creator of the handy tool. Katragudda and his team determined that the best way to navigate within Indian cities is to de-emphasise road names and highlight landmarks such as buildings,signs and parks.