Newsletter
In a bid to promote online content in local Indian languages, Google has announced to hold Search Conference 2018 in 11 tier-1 and tier-2 cities. The conferences aim at going beyond English and Hindi, two of the most used languages in the country, to have content published in more regional languages, with the focus primarily on Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, and Bengali. At each event, Google intends to bring together local-language publishers and webmasters to help them further their site’s reach by introducing content in the said languages. These conferences will be hosted by the members of Google Webmaster Outreach team who will educate the visitors about the basics of Google Search and will share tips and best practices for a better search visibility of their blog or website.
Google informed that its team will cover a range of topics that will help publishers improve viewership of their regional-language content. The Adsense team will also be hosting a session at the conferences to make the publishers understand their policies and ways to avoid general mistakes. The search giant has scheduled Search Conference 2018 from June till August in 11 Indian cities – Gurgaon (June 20), Pune (June 22), Indore (July 2), Patna (July 4), Lucknow (July 6), Hyderabad (July 16), Visakhapatnam (July 18), Kolkata (July 20), Coimbatore (July 30), Chennai (August 1), and Bengaluru (August 3) – with the Bengaluru event open only for women. You can head to the link provided below to register your interest, after which Google will send you an invitation email with venue details, if selected. The registrations for each city will close 10 days before their respective event’s date. Besides English, the registration form has also been made available in all the aforementioned Indian languages.
Despite having one of the largest bases of internet users, a greater section of India’s population still doesn’t access internet. Besides lack of adequate infrastructure in remote locations, the dearth of content in regional languages is a major factor holding many Indians back from getting online. Most of the currently published content in the country is in English, with a miniscule portion taken by Hindi. The majority of India’s English-speaking user base had gotten online during the first wave of internet boom in the country. The next set of internet users coming out of India won’t have English, or even Hindi, as their first language, making it crucial for internet companies like Google to enable the creation of content in more Indian regional languages.