Company Continues Aggressive Global Expansion To Bring Award-Winning Search Engine To Internet Users Worldwide
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – September 12, 2000 – Google Inc., developer of one of the fastest growing search engines on the web, today announced the immediate availability of four new language versions of the award-winning Google search engine. The expanded service enables users to conduct searches in Japanese, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese and Korean. Google now supports 15 different international languages, and by the end of this year will offer numerous additional languages, including Hebrew, Greek, and Russian.
The expanded international service is available from Google’s home page (www.google.com), where a link can be used to easily customize language preferences. Users can search for content in a specific 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. Current languages supported include Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish.
Google’s new Asian language search technology has already been greeted with enthusiastic response from the Google user community. During testing, users from all over the world responded favorably to the wide variety of new features. Google offers web surfers one of the largest collections of Asian language web pages on the Internet, with approximately 40 million Japanese language web pages, 24 million Chinese language web pages, and 10 million Korean language web pages.
"We’re pleased to now be able to offer the award-winning Google search engine to Asian language speakers," said Larry Page, Google CEO and co-founder. "With more than a billion searchable web pages, including almost 75 million in Asian language content, we anticipate this new technology will become widely used throughout the world."
Google was designed by Page and Sergey Brin to scale with the rapid growth of the Internet worldwide. Since its debut as a commercial web site in September 1999, Google has developed a rapidly growing base of loyal users worldwide. Today, Google answers more than 40 million search queries every day, and international users make up about half of the Google user community. NetEase, China’s leading Internet technology company, has already signed a deal to use Google as its Chinese language specific search engine and default web search results provider (www.google.com/press/pressrel/pressrelease32.html). The company’s success continues to grow with large monthly increases in worldwide website traffic, industry awards, and satisfied users.
"The Asian Internet marketplace represents tremendous revenue and partnership opportunities for Google," said Sergey Brin, Google’s president and cofounder "With almost half of our website traffic coming from outside the U.S. and over 80 customers in 20 countries, Google is rapidly becoming a recognized international brand."
Benefits of Google Search Technology
Designed for Internet users worldwide, Google’s search engine offers web surfers simple, fast, and highly relevant search results for every web-connected computer, including the emerging class of wireless devices such as Palm handheld computers, pagers, and Internet-ready mobile phones. The key benefits of Google’s search engine include its elegant, easy-to-use interface, and highly relevant results. Google is based on a variety of innovative technologies, including sophisticated text matching and its advanced, patent-pending PageRank, which ensures that the most important results always come up first. This scalable approach to search enables Google to get better as the Internet gets bigger.
About Google Inc.
Google exists to provide the world’s best Internet search experience. Google accomplishes this for millions of users daily by delivering a powerful, fast, and easy way to find the most relevant information available. Google’s technological innovations have powered the company to numerous awards, including a 2000 Webby and People’s Voice Award For Best Technical Achievement; Best Search Engine on the Internet from Yahoo! Internet Life; Top Ten Best Cybertech of 1999 by TIME Magazine; Technical Excellence Award from PC Magazine; and Best Search Engine by The Net. A growing number of companies, including Yahoo!, AOL (Netscape), Washingtonpost.com and Red Hat, 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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