Google News in Hindi

Posted by Vinodh Kumar R, Software Engineer

Millions of Hindi speakers across India and the rest of the world have a reason to cheer: Google News is now available in Hindi.

Google News gathers news stories from the various Hindi news sources on the web and presents a ranked one-page summary with all the links to your favourite news sources in the various sections. One of the interesting challenges we faced in this edition was the fact that not all our Hindi news sources are in UTF-8 format. Though we strongly back and urge the adoption of the Unicode-based UTF-8 standard by all Indian language websites, we didn't want to deprive our readers from reaching content on some of their favourite news sources which are not yet there. So we internally translate this information to the UTF-8 standard and do all the processing necessary to provide links to these sites. We hope that this edition will enable the huge Hindi-speaking Internet population to easily reach all of your favourite news content across the web, and also help news publishers to connect to their audience better.

We at the Google Bangalore office are pleased to launch our first Indian language edition of Google News -- and we will certainly be following up with more Indian languages in the future. On a personal note, this launch also marks the completion of a fun-filled and exciting first year for me at Google.

And now I'm off to tell my beloved family members and friends all the great news --or should I say Google News?