Why serving the UAE market is a challenge for Google

The various backgrounds of residents in the UAE and complexity of the Arab language is a challenge to Google in terms of what kinds of advertisements and search results they should offer to each individual, a senior Google official has said. Google general managing director of Mena Lino Cattaruzzi said that Google’s main source of income is through advertising and it’s a challenge for the firm to predict which ad would serve best to a consumer in the UAE as there are so many different nationalities and backgrounds. “Each region has its own challenges. In the Gulf, it has very unique ones. Let’s talk about the UAE in particular. Ninety per cent of people here are not UAE nationals. Typically, when we try to serve consumers, we try to understand how to best serve them and when you serve a homogeneous population, it’s much easier because it’s easier to predict how you serve them better,” Cattaruzzi said. “Let’s say you make an enquiry in English, I expect the answer to be tailor-made. If a local person makes an enquiry in Arabic — here we have so many different backgrounds and are so diverse that it’s really challenging for us to know how to serve them best. And it’s not just about the search engine, it’s about YouTube as well. You go and watch a video, but what’s the best video we should suggest to you? What are you looking for? When you say rose — are you talking about the colour or flower? Depending on who you are is the answer we give. So, this is the first challenge that is much more important here. “There’s one common language in the region and that’s Arabic but the question is, is that really the common language? If you get the people from some of the countries in the region together, they can communicate. But for us, if we go into the details of the language and we try to understand, well a person from Oman will speak differently from a Saudi. So, understanding this is a challenge. Our main source of income is advertising and to make advertising relevant we need to understand what customers are looking for.”