What impact will Google's Internet Bus have?

While the idea and the implementation seem promising, this is but the first step to getting India completely connected

What we are about to ask you to do is difficult to imagine because you live in a big city, but still we request you to try it out.

Assume that you are a villager who has spent most of his life in one of the smaller towns and have come to a big city only once in a blue moon.

A little hard to understand, right? When Dr Prasad Ram, the centre head and engineering director for Google India R&D talked about Google's Internet Bus, many people who are used to only living in cities would not have found it easy to understand the issues involved. Most of us order pizza on the Web and also book our tickets online. Some of us don't even read what is printed on dead trees.

Enter the village

As Dr Ram said, if you are in a place called Tiptur and want to go to another place called Karwar, then you don't need flight information you need to know about buses and trains. And he is mentioning this for a specific purpose.

While the Internet has thus far concentrated on the needs of the metro dweller, it is slowly seeping towards the common man in the villages. And Google, in its effort to give you relevant search results, is taking some steps towards the villages.

Search issues

There are a variety of issues involved in search when you go beyond the metro. As Dr Ram points out, "When you search for, say, 'Karavali Restaurant', then the first word is not an English word, but the second is." Similar issues also pop up when you search for local places like Byappanahalli and Gottikere, he says.

But Google is serious and one way it is trying to address the issue is by using things like transliteration, which allows people to type in English and have it translated into a language like Tamil or Kannada. This feature has already been added to Gmail, and something like this should make it easier for villagers to get connected to the Net.

Half a solution?

All this is great, but the Internet Bus only stops in one town for around a day. What happens next? Is not Google showing villagers the taste of things to come and then leaving them partially satisfied? Isn't this like showing a diabetic a big gulab jamoon, permitting him to take a nibble, and then telling him that he can have no more? When I asked Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, a product manager with Google India, he said that Google is also planning to do a follow up on the towns and villages already covered to determine the impact that they have made on villages.

Some impact can be seen up front for instance, according to Google, in Krishnagiri, an elderly couple visited the Internet Bus, used Gmail, and then decided to buy a computer to keep in touch with their son, who lives abroad. Dr Ram had also mentioned that India has some 100 million mobiles, and it is hoped that villagers who can't buy their own computers will at least pick up mobiles that have Web access and use them.

But, all said and done, Google is trying to show people what is possible. As Oliver Wendell Holmes mentioned in The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table in 1853, "Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions."

QUICK TAKE
>>Google has launched its Internet Bus recently
>>The Internet Bus will tour villages and small towns
>>It hopes to show people what the Internet can achieve

Pushing Indian languages
While the Internet has predominantly been about English, a lot of other languages are also making their mark. Among Indian languages, Hindi obviously is the most popular language on the Web, with Tamil a close second. After that come languages like Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam in no particular order. Of course, with interest in Indian languages growing, we can expect many more languages to take pride of place on the Web.