Google aims to increase Arabic content JEDDAH - There are now more one billion people with access to the Internet - all creating, sharing and searching for information. Everyday, hundreds of millions of people look for restaurants, holidays, news, books, and much more-comparing prices and products, checking to see whether a flight is delayed, or communicating with their friends in far-flung places. Traffic over the web is reaching mind-boggling volumes - over 80 billion emails are sent and 3.7 million photos are uploaded everyday; and the blogosphere is over 100 times bigger than it was just three years ago and doubling every 200 days. For many, life before the Internet is hard to imagine. It's easy to understand why - getting online has offered us us unprecedented opportunities to discover, learn, connect, and simplify many of the tasks that need to happen to run our daily lives. This level of access to information has brought freedom, power and choice to people in a way that has rarely been seen in recent modern history. However, this explosion of engagement with the worldwide web has not spread evenly across the globe. Internet penetration in the Arabic world currently stands at less than 10 percent (there are roughly 40 million online users out of a population of over 325 million). Madar Research reported earlier that less than 1 percent of the content on the web is in Arabic with around 150 million Arabic web pages, compared to 30 billion web pages worldwide. So what can be done about it and, more to the point, why should anyone care? At its very basic level, the Internet satisfies a fundamental human thirst for knowledge, communication and self-expression. The Internet has no borders - it facilitates a constant flow of information in multiple languages, on multiple subject matters from people from multiple countries. This ability to search across so many sources of information in more than 110 languages has put a myriad of subject matters at the fingertips of people who couldn't otherwise have expected to get access to it. The wealth of material available online - and the ability to automatically translate it into your own language - has democratized learning in an unprecedented way. From an exploration of rainforest damage in the Amazon on Google Earth, to the musings of a professor of marine biology, web search offers an increasing amount of helpful, specialist, informative content. Then there's communication. As a typical day likely involves working with others to perform personal and work-related tasks - a concept called “cloud computing” is making it much easier to get things done today, a big departure from a great deal of paper shifting, calendar juggling, and phone calling in the past. Cloud computing moves all of computer-based activities - searching, emailing, watching videos, creating documents, uploading photos, and more - to a virtual space on the Internet referred to as “the cloud”. The fact that this data is stored securely on the web means one can access the information he/she needs from any device with an Internet connection - including mobile and hand-held devices. This is a significant change for anyone without Internet access at home and for an increasingly mobile workforce. It also makes collaboration even easier than before. In the old world order, one has to send text or picture attachments round on email to organize an event or ask for feedback on a document. The cloud eradicates the need for this, which for businesses large and small in particular represents a huge opportunity to cut costs and boost efficiency. A team of designers around the world meet on a single, online document to plan their next product - all made possible simply by getting online. The Internet has also created enormous opportunities for millions of people worldwide to express themselves - from video sharing sites, blogs, social networks, the ability to create your own website - all have offered a platform on which individuals can make themselves heard by a worldwide audience. Few can deny that the Internet opens up access to information in a way that is crucial for the evolution of the modern world. To this end, Google is very committed to ensuring that the Middle East takes full advantage of the potential of the Web - starting from one's blog, creating a website, building an Arabic layer on Google Earth or sharing one's expertise on a subject using Knol, a Google project that aims to include user-written articles on a range of topics. By making products such as web search, Gmail, Google Sites and other products available in Arabic, providing translation tools and building local partnerships, Google aims to play its part in increasing the amount of relevant content online for Arabic local users, businesses and the region as a whole.
