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[AltaVista] is looking at a timeframe of six months to set up the subsidiary, which could also be used to serve the Asian market.
According to the article AV had been thinking of a Hindi engine for a couple of years, but conditions weren't favorable until now.
Cuz, even though there are more then billion people in India, but more then 80% to 90% would be knowing Hindi, eventhough it is not their primary language (and almost 100% people who went to school are likely to know Hindi).
Also, think about Indian people all over the world, they generally communicate in Hindi with other Indians even if they are from different states. So I believe they are right on track with this one and if they can make is real popular then it would a great comeback for them.
Makes sense to me as well. 400 million world wide? Aren't there something like 1 billion in India (people, anyway)...though I guess they don't all speak Hindi...what with all the local & regional dialects.
Hindi is spoken only in North and Western part of India. People in the rest of the region do understand Hindi but not everybody is good at READING Hindi.
They have a big job on their hands - not everybody has heard about AltaVista. When it comes to search engine, it is Google and when it comes to portals, it is Yahoo.
It makes more sense for them to come up with Altavista.co.in with Indian news and content in ENGLISH.
They have a better chance of success if they try to focus more on developing partnerships with Indian portals and work with them for providing English language searches because as of now, as the things stand, Google rules the Indian search market.
Though they have made the right choice regarding their solutions provider, but they have a difficult task ahead as far as Hindi search engine is concerned.
But the market here is not mature enough - maybe Overture will start thinking about it 5 years from now..
Perhaps ChaltaAhista? (go slow) :)
AV was my favourite until perhaps two years ago.
I left India 30 years ago but my gut feeling is that it won't make business sense to have a Hindi interface. There might be a secondary benefit, say, if the government made available a lot of content in Hindi and asked its own staff to use AV.
I suspect that most Indians who use the Net prefer to search in English. Hindi would be such a pain to key in and how many Hindi hits would one find? If the Hindi user gets English-language hits that he can read, then he might as well stick with English.
