According to the latest report, Google plans to set up more development teams in Asian countries to customize services according to different cultures and customs of various countries.
Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president at Google, said: “You can’t simply translate a product developed for the U.S. market into a local language and launch it in Asian countries. To be successful in Southeast Asia and some other markets, we have to invest in a better understanding of the local culture .”
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Currently, Google already has a local development team in Japan, working on improving the search service to suit Japanese users. One of the team’s main tasks, Raghavan said, is to provide more search suggestions than in other countries, because, in Japan, users enter very concise keywords when searching. ”
In addition, Google also has a team in India. But contrary to Japan, Indians like to use voice search, so the search terms are very long. “In this context, the accuracy of speech recognition becomes critical,” Raghavan said,” and with 20 different languages spoken in India, it’s even harder to do that .”
Raghavan said that Google has realized that in some countries it is necessary to have local teams that are very attuned to the local culture and society. To this end, Google aims to establish such local development teams in Southeast Asia and other countries.
According to data, the proportion of Internet users in Southeast Asia in 2021 has reached 75% (accounting for the total population), and it is growing rapidly, with an increase of 40 million last year alone.
Raghavan said: “Look at countries like India, Vietnam, and Indonesia, they have very young Internet users and almost all new Internet users in the world are from these populations. We realize that serving young new Internet users is always a Conundrum. We’ve been working on that for years, too.”
In addition, Google faces competition from rivals such as the short-video app TikTok. “There is no doubt that young people particularly like short videos,” Raghavan said. Raghavan also acknowledged the success of TikTok but said: “We also have relatively successful and growing short videos on YouTube. In many Asia-Pacific markets, its usage is very high.”
