Google - one of the world's most popular Internet search engines - has launched four new country-specific domains - one of which is the 'ae' domain of the UAE. The three others include Singapore, Greece and Finland.

When a UAE-based surfer clicks for Google, its advanced software recognises the origin of the request as coming from the UAE. It instantly produces its 'ae' webpage which is in Arabic.

To access the English language page, a Net surfer needs to click on the 'Google in English' option or go to the master Web site of Google.com.

"We are delighted to announce that as part of Google's ongoing effort to make its search services available to people throughout the world, the company launched four new country-specific domains including: Finland, Greece, Singapore and the UAE.

"These new sites offer a localised interface and enable users to restrict searches to pages from their respective countries," said Debbie Frost, Google spokesperson.

She said in addition to these new domains, Google offers a number of foreign language search tools including 86 Google interface languages and a beta tool that enables users to translate the text for 12 language pairs (eg. English to German, German to French etc).

These tools are available via the language tools link on the Google home page or directly at: www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en.

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