In many parts of the world, people often can often speak a language but not know how to read the script. Are you one of them? If so, Script Converter is the tool for you. Script Converter breaks down the script barrier by allowing you to read text in any script you want.

This tool converts a given web page or piece of text from one script to another. Remember, this does not translate, it transliterates (convert to phonetic equivalent) in a different script. For example, if you can speak Hindi, you know that ‘namaste’ is a greeting in Hindi but you can’t read ‘नमस्ते’ in Hindi script.

Using script converter you can convert ‘नमस्ते’ to 'namaste' in english script, which you can read. Similarly, you can read hindi web pages rendered in english script by giving the URL. To start browsing a website, type the url in the text area, choose your preferred script and press convert.

We currently support 17 languages with 17X17 conversion support: Bengali, English, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

Please try it out and let us know what you think and how you're using it.

Posted by New Melchizedec Sundararaj and Mohammed Aslam, Software Engineers

Google India, today, announced its 2^nd IPL Zeitgeist for 2010 – an insight into the most searched teams and players during the 3^rd season of the Indian Premier League. Sachin Tendulkar emerged as the most searched Indian cricketer, followed by Saurav Ganguly. Shane Warne continued to be the most searched international player at the IPL, for the second year running. Conspicuous by their absence were popular names such as M.S. Dhoni, Virender Sehwag and ‘the Fake IPL Player’, who moved off the top 10 this year. Adam Gilchrist, Ryan Harris and Praveen Kumar made their debut on the list at number 7, 8 and 9 respectively.

• Sachin Tendulkar is the most searched player
• Deccan Chargers is the most searched team
• Shane Warne is the most searched international player
• Fake IPL player, Dhoni and Sehwag move off the IPL Zeitgeist
• Super Over and Chennai Super Kings were the most searched IPL related search queries on YouTube

Among the teams, Deccan Chargers ousted the Mumbai Indians from the top slot, who emerged as a close second. Chennai Super Kings rounded up the top 3 teams, as Kolkata Knight Riders dropped to number 4 this year.

‘Super Over’ emerged as the most searched IPL related query on YouTube followed by Chennai Super Kings. Yusuf Pathan, who did not make it to the IPL Zeitgeist on Google Search, emerged as the most searched player on YouTube.

To compile the 2010 IPL Zeitgeist, Google studied the aggregation of queries pertaining to IPL that people typed into Google search during the IPL season 3. We used data from multiple sources, including Insights for Search, Google Trends and internal data tools. We also filtered out spam and repeat queries to arrive to a list which captured the essence of the series. All of the search queries we studied are anonymous - no personal information was used.

Most searched IPL player

2010	2009
Sachin Tendulkar	Fake IPL Player
Sourav Ganguly	Sachin Tendulkar
Shane Warne	M.S. Dhoni
Yuvraj Singh	Yuvraj Singh
Rahul Dravid	Sourav Ganguly
Brett Lee	Rahul Dravid
Adam Gilchrist	Virender Sehwag
Ryan Harris	Shane Warne
Praveen Kumar	Harbhajan Singh
Harbhajan Singh	V.V.S Laxman

Top 10 IPL Teams

2010	2009
Deccan Chargers	Mumbai Indians
Mumbai Indians	Kolkata Knight Riders
Chennai Super Kings	Deccan Chargers
Kolkata Knight Riders	Rajasthan Royals
Rajasthan Royals	Chennai Super Kings
Delhi Daredevils	Delhi Daredevils
Kings XI Punjab	Royal Challengers Bangalore
Royal Challengers Bangalore	Kings XI Punjab

Top IPL related Search Queries on YouTube

• Super Over
• Chennai Super Kings
• Match 22
• Kolkata Knight Riders
• Match 21
• Yusuf Pathan
• Mumbai Indians
• Highlights

Posted by Google India

Over the years, our Google India engineers have worked hard to develop products to fit the unique needs of Indian users. One good example of this is Google Phone Search, which started as an India labs experiment in 2008, to offer users in India the ability to search for information on their phone by dialing into a toll free number.

This labs experiment helped us learn more about user needs and build core technologies like speech recognition, which are helping change how people search and perform other activities on the web. It also served as the starting point for our recently launched Google Mobile App, which enables users to search by voice, and is compatible with a variety of Indian accents.

Given the overlapping purposes of these products, we’ll be winding down Google Phone Search and encouraging Indian users to take advantage of Google Mobile App (GMA), which provides a far richer experience compared to the limited medium of phone call. GMA allows you to visually interact in addition to speech. So if you were a fan of Google Phone Search may be it’s time to say hello to GMA and give it a try.

Posted by Speech Team , Google India

(Cross-posted from the Google Lat Long Blog)

Members of our Google Map Maker community have always told us that the biggest milestone after launching maps for their countries is adding driving directions. A few months ago we launched driving directions in 18 countries in Eastern Europe and Asia-Pacific. We have now enabled directions in 111 new countries and territories across the globe.

So, whether you find yourself in Lima, Peru or visiting Iceland or driving from Johannesburg to Nairobi, you can now use Google Maps to find out how to get around.

Driving directions on Google Maps are now available for:

Algeria, American Samoa, Angola, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Aruba, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Barbados, Belize, Benin, Bermuda, Bhutan, Bolivia, Botswana, British Virgin Islands, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Cayman Islands, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Cote d'Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Faroe Islands, Fiji, French Guiana, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Greenland, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Iceland, Iran, Jamaica, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Marshall Islands, Martinique, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mayotte, Montserrat, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Netherlands Antilles, Niger, Nigeria, Niue, Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Qatar, Reunion, Rwanda, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Somalia, Sudan, Suriname, Swaziland, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Timor-Leste, Togo, Tonga, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Turks and Caicos Islands, Uganda, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Wallis and Futuna, Western Sahara, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Do give it a try and tell us what you think on Map Your World Community. If you find something that is missing or not otherwise quite right, you can always map it at www.google.com/mapmaker.

Posted by Vishwajith Krishnamurthy, Software Engineer; Zareer K'Maneck, Program Manager; and Manik Gupta, Product Manager

(Cross-posted from the Google Webmaster Central Blog)

You may have heard that here at Google we're obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we've seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

If you are a site owner, webmaster or a web author, here are some free tools that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site:

• Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages' load performance plus an optimization checklist.
• In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We've also blogged about site performance.

• Many other tools on code.google.com/speed.

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven't seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.

We encourage you to start looking at your site's speed (the tools above provide a great starting point) — not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone's experience on the Internet.

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer, Google Search Quality Team

(Cross-posted from the Google Webmaster Central Blog)

Sitemaps are an invaluable resource for search engines. They can highlight the important content on a site and allow crawlers to quickly discover it. Images are an important element of many sites and search engines could equally benefit from knowing which images you consider important. This is particularly true for images that are only accessible via JavaScript forms, or for pages that contain many images but only some of which are integral to the page content.

Now you can use a Sitemaps extension to provide Google with exactly this information. For each URL you list in your Sitemap, you can add additional information about important images that exist on that page. You don’t need to create a new Sitemap, you can just add information on images to the Sitemap you already use.

Adding images to your Sitemaps is easy. Simply follow the instructions in the Webmaster Tools Help Center or refer to the example below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1">
<url>
<loc>http://example.com/sample.html</loc>
<image:image>
<image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc>
</image:image>
</url>
</urlset>

We index billions of images and see hundreds of millions of image-related queries each day. To take advantage of that traffic most effectively, take a moment to update your Sitemap file with information on the images from your site. Let us know in the Sitemaps forum if you have any questions.

Posted by Alkis Evlogimenos, Software Engineer