Up close and personal

Search giant Google may just have embarked on a  well-publicised Street View image collection trip around South Africa, but that`s just one of several projects the company is carrying out to "South Africanise"  its services

New Google SA country manager Stephen Newton says Google`s mission is to make the world`s information universally available and useful. In line with this, several projects are underway to make the search machine relevant and understandable to South Africans. With the 2010 World Cup looming, Google is also busily collecting useful information about South Africa for tourists.

SAY CHEESE

The Street View project, which gives Google Maps users street level photographs of a given area, kicked off in SA at the beginning of this month in partnership with Toyota.

Google staff are currently driving around Johannesburg, Cape Town, Pretoria, Port Elizabeth and Durban, taking photographs of every street.  Privacy is protected by blurring faces and car registration numbers, and people can also request certain photos removed, if they are a valid problem with them.  Street View, already covering over 100 metropolitan areas around the world, is also available in Google Earth and on Google Maps for Mobile.  Its uses are varied: tourists can get a better idea of the place they are going, prospective homeowners can check out a neighbourhood, and businesses can embed Google maps onto their sites to enable customers to see exactly where they are located and how the environment looks.

By all accounts, Street View is an incredibly popular service; and SA Tourism Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk sounds pleased to have it covering SA too.

He said: "Street View is going to make South Africa more accessible both to locals and to international visitors. It will give tourists a taste of the variety that the country offers, and a chance to research their holidays in advance, all with the click of a mouse."

MORE THAN PICTURES

But Street View is far from the only project Google has underway in SA. Newton notes that Google has been in SA since 2007, and has a multi-pronged approach to doing business here. A small team based in Bryanston, the Google SA office is mainly sales focused. Newton says there has been steady growth in its client base since it opened in SA, "but, more importantly, we have seen increased understanding of the value Google delivers to the local market in terms of what the online world has to offer."

"Our strategy here includes three angles: localising our products for the South African market, building partnerships, and investing in local advertising. - We`re aiming to educate and raise awareness in the South African market - especially among SMBs - about online marketing, " says Newton.

"We`re committed to working with local businesses - especially in the tourism sector -  to that ensure visitors can access their services online. The internet also has a real role to play in helping small businesses expand their revenues and stay ahead during recession. It has democratised advertising so that small companies play on the same field as big companies. - Everyone can advertise globally and target niche markets in a viable way. A family-run bed and breakfast with a small budget in Durban, or tour company in Jo`burg, for example, can now sell themselves to the whole world in a cost-effective way."

Google says it is also working on bringing Maps to SA, but a product that complex takes time. So too does offering local languages on the service.

Newton says: " We would like to make our services available in as many languages as possible, to give everyone using Google the information they want, wherever they are, and through whatever device they`re using.  This definitely means `South Africanising` our products, and paying plenty of emphasis on innovation in the mobile space.  We`ve recently announced the availability of Google Translate for two African languages - Swahili and Afrikaans - which is just a first step. - Machine translation is a complex challenge from an engineering perspective: one of the main challenges is the ability to find large amounts of translated documents from which our system learns to translate."

TAKING FLAK?

Google SA came under fire under its previous country manager, Stafford Masie, for alleged anti-competitive behaviour. But Newton isn`t willing to comment on the Entelligence complaints to the Competition Commission.

"We don`t comment on ongoing legal proceedings, but Google has strict professional protocols for working with agencies and clients in South Africa and around the world; these were developed specifically to ensure that a fair and open business model continues to be in operation," he says.

And still on the subject of competition, Newton says Google isn`t phased by the emergence of competitors like Microsoft`s Bing. "As we say quite frequently, competition is always only a click away.  We welcome competition that helps deliver useful information to users and expands user choice. Having great competitors is a huge benefit to us and everyone in the search space - it makes us all work harder, and at the end of the day our users benefit from that."

SPREADING REACH

Google`s reach in Africa extends beyond SA too. Newton notes: "In addition to South Africa, we now have offices in Egypt and Kenya, as well as Google leads for Senegal, Ghana, Uganda and Nigeria."