India’s the second-most populous country in the world, and it looks like Google’s getting increasingly serious about acquiring customers there.  Today, Google opened a call center in Hyderabad designed to deal with local small and medium-sized businesses in any of four languages.

Sridhar Seshadri, Google India’s head of online sales and operations, explained to the Press Trust of India, "India is a strategic market for Google.  We are looking to significantly invest in our efforts to maximise our reach and educate the Indian SMEs to gain from the benefits of online advertising."

Seshadri also said, "The idea is to help them (SMEs) learn how to manage advertising campaigns online and grow their businesses by using our platform."

That should endear Google to the firms, perhaps leading more of them to use its tools.  And word-of-mouth recommendations could be bolstered by formal advertising campaigns, of course.

Plus, Google’s encouraging growth to occur in another way, considering that the new call center is supposed to add support for at least four more languages (Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, and Oriya on top of the initial set of Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telegu) sometime in the next several months.

It should be interesting to see what sort of revenue Google’s able to generate in India, assuming the search giant is willing to break things down by country anytime soon.