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Vishwanath Kulkarni

BANGALORE, Dec. 2

BUOYED by the response towards its India-specific search engine, AltaVista, the Internet search company, is planning to expand its footprint in country by coming out with a Hindi language search engine.

"The roll out of the Hindi search engine is expected to happen over the next six months,'' said Ms Mel Bohse, Vice-President, Asia Pacific, AltaVista.

``We felt that there is no reliable search engine in Hindi with a good content base, while there is a need for it," Ms Bohse said adding that "while we basically intend to start with Hindi, we are also looking at South Indian languages.''

AltaVista has started the process of indexing contents in Hindi and is exploring the possibilities of working with several Indian companies in this regard. "We are considering various options on getting the work done here in India and how to integrate the Hindi content base with our global index. We are talking to a few local language and translation companies," she said.

AltaVista, which has come out with a new brand strategy for its worldwide operations, said it's got a good response to its India-specific search engine. The company claims a unique user base of three million in India, one of the four potential markets besides Korea, Japan and Australia.

"We have seen a 10 per cent growth in Internet traffic in India over the last six months, which is significantly higher than the global growth rate of 6 per cent," she said.

"India is a very challenging market and has a good potential as there is a large online community growing pretty fast," she said. AltaVista has tied up with portals and vortals such as Indiainfo.com, Cricketnext.com, Indiainfoline.com and KlubQ.com and is expected to announce few more in the coming weeks.

The company is also targeting major publishers, banks, software houses, job sites and corporates. Internet marketing company Media Turf represents AltaVista in India.

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