India's 15th general election: tools for citizen empowerment

At Google, we believe information is fundamentally empowering. While all of our technologies demonstrate a commitment to this guiding principle, information is especially important when a society comes together to participate in democratic elections. Beginning ten days from today, more than 700 million eligible voters in India will over the course of four weeks have the opportunity to participate in the largest democratic event in human history — India's 15th general election.

Today, along with a wide range of partners, we are happy to announce the launch of the Google India Elections Centre - available in English and in Hindi.

People from across India can use the centre to do the following:

• Confirm their voter registration status
• Discover their polling location
• View their constituency on a map
• Consume relevant election-related news, blogs, videos, and quotations
• Evaluate the status of development in their constituency across a range of indicators
• Learn about the background of their Member of Parliament and this year's candidates
  

With still more features to be added during the election, we hope the site will be an ongoing resource for analysis, governance, and democracy in India after the election.

This project would not have been possible without the shared vision of a broad coalition of partners: the Association for Democratic Reforms, HT Media Limited, Indicus Analytics, the Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, the Liberty Institute, and PRS Legislative Services. These groups are the true champions of promoting a more transparent democracy, and we're privileged to be able to shine a light on their work on the occasion of India's 15th Lok Sabha polls.

We're hopeful not only that the elections centre will further a culture that seeks access to information, but that it will also yield positive changes in voting patterns during the upcoming polls.

Please visit the site, select your constituency, and get started! Spread the word about what you learn and, of course, don't forget to visit the polls.

Posted by Rishi Jaitly, Senior Policy Analyst, and Sanjay Jain, Product Manager

Search tools for Indian language websites

As a Google employee, I really like search, and I especially like being able to search for content on a web site using a search box, like the "Search our Blog" box on the right of this page. However, very few Indian language web sites have such a search box, probably because most users find it hard to input queries in Indian languages using their English keyboards.

If you are a web master who runs an Indian language web site, and would like to enable users to search through your web pages, Google can help you give your users the ability to search, without you having to write any code. All you would need to do is to configure and embed one of our iGoogle gadgets.

Lets say that you have a Tamil language web site and want to enable search within your site. You would go through the following steps:

1. Go to the gadget syndication page and search for the keyword Tamil
2. Choose either the transliteration search gadget or the on screen keyboard gadget
3. Click on the "Add to your webpage" button
4. Configure the size, title and border
5. Type the domain name of your web site in the site restrict box
6. Click on the "Get the code" button, and copy the Javascript code to your web site

Your site visitors will be able to use our transliteration technology to convert the equivalent English characters into Tamil words, or click on the letters of the Tamil alphabet to search on your site depending on which of the two gadgets you chose. If your web site is in another language you can choose the appropriate language gadgets. Currently our Transliteration API supports Hindi, Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu, while we have on screen keyboards in about 18 languages.

If you want to help site visitors search through multiple web sites instead of just one, you can create a Custom Search Engine and specify the id of the Custom Search Engine instead of a domain name when you configure the gadget. As an example we have embedded a Tamil on screen keyboard gadget into this post, that searches through Indian Government Web sites. Try a query like "வேலை வாய்ப்பு" for example.

So, go ahead and help your visitors search through your Indian language web sites !

Posted by M. T. Raghunath, Software Engineer