Millions of Hindi speakers across India and the rest of the world have a reason to cheer: Google News is now available in Hindi.

Google News gathers news stories from the various Hindi news sources on the web and presents a ranked one-page summary with all the links to your favourite news sources in the various sections. One of the interesting challenges google faced in this edition was the fact that not all Hindi news sources are in UTF-8 format. Though google strongly back and urge the adoption of the Unicode-based UTF-8 standard by all Indian language websites, google didn’t want to deprive hindi readers from reaching content on some of google’s favourite news sources which are not yet there. So google internally translate this information to the UTF-8 standard and do all the processing necessary to provide links to these sites. Google hope that this edition will enable the huge Hindi-speaking Internet population to easily reach all of their favourite news content across the web, and also help news publishers to connect to their audience better.

And now I’m off to tell my beloved family members and friends all the great news –or should I say Google News?