India is where Google searches for big ideas: Sundar Pichai

NEW DELHI: For Google, India is where the ideas are born, and their efficacy tested, before rolling it out to the world. This message was written large at the search giant’s outing in the country on Wednesday. Google chief Sundar Pichai made a strong statement about the important role India will play in the overall strategy.

Pichai and other visiting Google executives made it clear that India is at the heart of company’s strategy not just as a burgeoning base of users but as a product development base.

With this in mind, Google will expand its presence in India with “a new campus in Hyderabad,” and increase hiring in other centres too. It is also tapping the strong developer community in the country since it is central to creating new products, said Pichai. It will launch a programme to train two million developers on its Android platform over the next three years through a partnership with the National Skill development Corporation of India.

“It makes sense to invest in India as what we build here will have global usage,” he said. MapMaker — a crowdsourced map updation tool, which was made in India in 2008 by two Indian engineers and landmark - based navigation for Maps are just two of the examples of ideas born in India and used by Google users globally.

Early next year, Google will also introduce “launch tap to translate”, a feature that will enable direct translation to Hindi in messaging apps. Google recently held a “translateathon”, Pichai said, “where we had 20,000 volunteers contribute translations and we translated over 1 million Hindi words so we can understand and help users translate.”