Whether you're an individual sharing travel stories, a business owner connecting with potential clients or employees or a school looking to post homework assignments, the easiest way to share information is increasingly by setting up a web site. Today, Google is announcing the launch of Google Sites in Arabic, a free application that makes creating a web site as simple as editing a document, making it faster and simpler for Arab users to share local language content online. Google Sites will be available in Arabic to all users, including consumer, education and business users.
With Google Sites, people can quickly gather a variety of information in one place -- including videos, calendars, presentations, photos, attachments, gadgets and text -- and easily share it for viewing or editing with a small group, their entire organization, or the world.
"The Internet has become the primary means of communication for many organizations, businesses, and individuals in their everyday lives," said Wael Ghonim, Regional Marketing Manager MENA. "We strive to make our products available in every language around the world. Making Google Sites available in Arabic means Arab users can create a customized and sharable site within minutes, without using even a line of code. All it takes to start a new page is just one click."
Creating and editing a set of pages in a Google Site requires no knowledge of HTML or web design skills. All content is instantly searchable, and Google Sites is accessible through any web browser.
To set up a Google Site, please visit http://sites.google.com. Google Sites is also available as part of Google Apps for Enterprise. To learn more about using Google Apps in your business, please visit http://www.google.com/a
Google News in 4 new domains
Today Google also launched four new Arabic editions of Google News for Egypt, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Users in these countries can now access Google News editions specific to their country and get the latest headlines in topics such as Politics, Business, Sports, Entertainment and more.
With more than 24 million Arabic-speaking Internet users in those countries and 40 million across the Middle East and North Africa, we understand the need to provide our users with the most relevant news for their region. Like all Google News editions, our computer-generated Arabic editions aggregate headlines from thousands of news outlets around the world, group similar stories together and link directly to the original sources that publish these stories. This enables users to search for topics they're interested in, and read a wide variety of perspectives from different sources. It also enables publishers to expand their reach to a wider audience, thus increasing traffic to their site.
If you'd like to see a site included in Google News, or would like to send feedback our way, please contact us.
We're very excited to offer this service to our Arabic users in Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and we look forward to making more local editions available to the rest of the Arab countries in the near future!
Ramadan Mubarak to all!
