Google search goes 'desi' with Hindi tool

Global Internet search engine Google on Wednesday unveiled a software tool enabling Indian netizens to search its encyclopedic website by writing in Hindi (Devanagari) script. "Instead of typing Hindi letters from an English keyboard, netizens can handwrite on screen what they want to search on our engine using our new Hindi tool, as the Internet can be used as easily as reading and writing in the vernacular," Google India said in a statement here.

In its quest to get about 300 million more Indian users online, the company's geeks found that less than 10 percent of Internet usage was in Indian languages, while in the real world the remaining 90 percent of newspaper readers or television viewers were using the media in their respective mother tongue.