Bangalore: Worlds' largest internet search engine Google has begun work on speech and multimedia content search even as its founders today (Oct 13, 2004) said that text search will continue to be dominant in future. "We are working on speech, image and multimedia content search. But text will be a huge area and a medium that will continue....we believe text will remain dominant for many years," Google co-founder and president, Larry Page told reporters in Bangalore at its India R&D centre. Page and co-founder Sergey Brin, who heads technology, are here on their first visit to the country, bullish of its India team building "great products" for the world.

Google has set up a "mirror image" of its Mountain View office in US here with about 10 people and is "hiring aggressively", but officials declined to comment on specific numbers or investments, including in their Hyderabad centre.

"We were too late ourselves, (we would have) preferred to do it sooner. But there are only so many things we can do at once," Brin, who joined Page while studying at Stanford University and worked on the project that became Google, said.

Google India R&D Centre co-head Lalitesh Katragadda said that scientists were working on an "expanded image search", besides a demo lab using speech search.

His colleague, Krishna Bharat, credited for inventing Google News said, they had begun working on understanding nuances of Indian languages to enable search in East Asian scripts.