Wednesday, August 6, 2008 7:48 PM
வணக்கம். தமிழில் செய்திகள்! (Greetings, News In Tamil!)
It's not every day that you get to launch a product in a more than 2,000-year-old language spoken by more than 70 million people. That's why we're excited to tell you that Google News is now available in Tamil. Tamil is one of the most widely-spoken languages in India, which is no mean feat considering that there are 22 official languages here.
The Google News Tamil edition indexes news from a large number of Tamil sources and automatically arranges these stories in different sections. In addition to the usual Google News sections, we have seperate local sections for Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, regions that are home to millions of Tamilians. One issue we faced during the launch of the Tamil edition was incorporating news sites that do not use the Unicode based UTF-8 standard. We faced similar issues when we launched our Hindi edition last year. Since then, we are pleased to note that several Hindi news sites have shifted to the Unicode standard (and we encourage all publishers to do the same, so that more people can read your online publication.)
We hope this edition will help Tamil readers reach their online news destinations faster and help Tamil news publishers to connect more easily to their readers.
