Taťána le Moigne, country director for Google's Czech-language mirror, spoke to NYU students Nov. 16.

Text and photo by Cassidy Havens

Search Google.com for “NYU” and you get a lot of pages from the main campus in New York City, but you have to dig pretty deep before you find a link to the study-abroad program here in Prague. Do the same search on Google.cz, however, and the local program is the sixth result.

The difference between the two Googles is the make-up of search results. When users search with Google.cz, they receive results which are skewed toward the Czech Republic and the interests of people who live there.

Taťána le Moigne, country director for Google in the Czech Republic, explained the difference between Google.com and Google.cz in a November 16 lecture at Richtruv dům entitled “Building Google in the Czech Republic.”

Google.cz is the highest-ranking Czech server for video searches and second-highest for web search. The engine has become a strong rival with Seznam, the leading Czech web browser and email service. Le Moigne finds Google’s local placement healthy. “[Now] there’s the availability of first-class Internet technologies and services in the local language and [the market] is more competitive,” she says.

Seznam holds the lead as the Number 1 search engine in the Czech Republic because of local users’ familiarity with the website and its functions, le Moigne says. Seznam is more localized than Google’s global brand, but le Moigne says Google has, and still is, making strides in localizing.

Seznam combines news, weather, TV programming, horoscopes, and stocks all on one page similar to Yahoo!. Google, on the other hand, takes a more minimalistic approach and allows users to customize what they would like to see when they first log in.

Google established its Czech mirror in 2006 and, at its founding, made le Moigne the sole employee. “I was contacted through the network of my friends [when Google] was searching for someone in Central Europe,” she says. Le Moigne, who is originally from the Czech Republic and married to a Frenchman, formerly worked at Microsoft as a regional manager in London and Central and Eastern Europe. In addition to working for Google, she is also the owner and CEO of 4bambini.cz, the Czech division of an international company that sells children’s products.

In four years, Google.cz has grown to a team of 40 with employees in Prague and Dublin, and a team of engineers in Zurich. “In 2006, nine percent of [Czech] Internet users knew about Google; in 2009, 77 percent believed it was the future search engine,” le Moigne says.

From the main priority being the actual launching of the office in 2006, today Google.cz’s priority is the user, le Moigne says.

Le Moigne says she believes Czech businesses have benefited from the establishment of Google.cz, in addition to the users. While users can now make informed decisions about what to buy and where to go thanks to Internet sources, “businesses better understand the value of Internet advertising, whether it be search, contextual ads or video,” le Moigne says.

Le Moigne’s presentation on Google in the Czech Republic was an interactive one. More than 40 people attended the lecture. Marketing professor Hana Huntová asked her Introduction to Marketing students to attend the lecture. They, along with other attendees, formed groups to discuss and compare the pros and cons of Google, Seznam and Facebook. Students criticized Facebook’s lack of privacy, Seznam’s busy homepage, and Google’s formatting of group emails.