Google gets Bangalored

Google isn't conventional and so aren't its co-founders. Meeting them is pure fun. Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded this search engine and have been applying some really unconventional approaches to constantly innovate and keep giving you those results for your searches.

Be it their offerings of listings or news or email, this one search engine has been using the best of the available computer science brains to simplify and refine its basic product.

Google announced its R&D centre in Bangalore in early 2004 when the term Bangalored was being branded about for jobs being outsourced to Bangalore. That was also when people using the net started asking each other, "Did you Google today?"

The company set up its centre six months ago to continue its effort to organise the information overload of the internet in a transparent and superior way. Said Larry Page: "We should have been here (in Bangalore) much earlier. Now that we are here, we will see how to steer this centre in our endeavour."

The mandate for Bangalore centre is quite unconventional. Engineers can choose what projects they want to work on and can carry on the work in any Google location across the globe.

"There is no specific roadmap. Each of our engineers contributes with their expertise to our mission which is to make the search engine more and more relevant to an internet user," noted Sergey Brin.

Localisation, translation, refinement all leading to delivering the best search experience is the base line and computer scientists with a high degree of innovation are being cherry picked for the Bangalore centre.

"We are pretty selective in this process and so far we have hired around 10 such people," said Krishna Bharat, centre head, Google India.

As Microsoft, with its already growing net presence, is also readying its search engine, Google will need all the unconventional brains and ideas it can muster to stay ahead in the upcoming challenge.