Google wants more small and medium Indian businesses online by 2017

There are around 51 million Small and Medium Businesses (SMEs) in India. However, less than 5-6 per cent are currently online. Goggle aims to bridge this titanic gap with its mobile app, Google My Business (GMB).

"In the next three years, India will have over 500 million internet users, who will search for information, including local businesses. The search experience for local business in India is broken today and we want to help connect businesses and customers," Rajan Anandan, VP and Managing Director, Google South East Asia and India told reporters today.

The app will help small and medium businesses (SMBs) create and manage information about their businesses online in English and Hindi across the Google platform for free. They’ll neither have to invest in a website, nor a domain.

"GMB is our first mobile-based product initiative for SMBs and we have seen huge uptake of it. In the last five months of the pilot phase, over a million SMBs have already signed on. We are engaging with 25,000 new SMBs every week," Anandan said.

The search engine giant aims to bring 20 million small and medium businesses in India online by 2017 through the new app.

Google had earlier launched the immensely successful 'India Get Your Business Online' scheme to provide free website, domain and web hosting to Indian SMBs. The programme had helped around half a million businesses in India.

(Image credit: Google)