Company Launches First Step in Aggressive Global Expansion
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – May 9, 2000 – Google Inc., one of the fastest growing search engines on the web, today announced the immediate availability of 10 new language versions of the award-winning Google search engine. The expanded service enables users to conduct searches in French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian and Danish. By year-end, the company plans to offer Google in numerous additional languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
The expanded international service is available on Google’s home page (www.google.com), where a link can be used to easily customize language preferences. Users can now restrict language, and can view versions of the Google home page, search tips, and help pages in their preferred language. Language preferences can also be saved for return visits to the Google website.
Google’s new international search technology has already been greeted with enthusiastic response from the Google user community. While in beta, web surfers from all over the world responded favorably to the wide variety of new, localized features.
"Google’s search engine has always had strong global appeal," said Larry Page, Google CEO and co-founder. "We attribute this success to the site’s simplicity of design, ease of use, and highly relevant results. By localizing our search services to new international communities, Google will open up a host of new revenue, sales, and partnership channels."
According to Jupiter Communications, a leading provider of research on Internet trends, 80 percent of all websites on the Internet today are in English. The research firm estimates that 55 percent of all websites will be published in languages other than English by 2003.
Google was designed by Page and Sergey Brin to scale with the rapid growth of the Internet worldwide. Launched as a beta site in September 1998, Google went live as a commercial website a year later. Since its debut, the search engine has developed a rapidly growing base of loyal users worldwide. Today, international users make up about 35 percent of the Google user community. The company’s success continues to grow with large monthly increases in worldwide website traffic, industry awards, and happy users.
Google’s search engine offers web surfers simple, fast, and highly relevant search results for every web-connected computer, including wireless devices such as Internet-enabled mobile phones. The benefits of Google’s search engine include its ease of use, clean interface, and highly relevant search results. Google is based on a variety of innovative technologies that ensure that the most important results always come up first. This scalable approach to search enables Google to get better as the Internet gets bigger.
"Google plans to quickly expand into a wide variety of new international markets," said Sergey Brin, Google’s president and cofounder "The simplicity of our user interface and the scalability of our back-end systems enables us to expand very quickly."
About Google Inc.
Google Inc. exists to provide the best Internet search experience, and accomplishes this for millions of users daily by delivering a powerful, fast, and easy-to-use search service for finding the most relevant information. Google has received numerous industry awards for its technological innovations, including "Best Search Engine on the Internet" from Yahoo! Internet Life. Google recently was ranked No. 1 in user satisfaction and loyalty in a leading independent research firm’s Search & Portal Site Tracking Study, with 97 percent of users surveyed indicating they would recommend Google to a friend. A growing number of companies, including Netscape and The Washington Post, rely on Google to power search on their websites. A privately held company based in Mountain View, Calif., Google’s investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital. For the information you need, visit www.google.com.
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