Bangalore: Google Drive was launched recently and had almost everybody talking, especially since Google doc users can get their accounts linked to this service almost seamlessly. But one thing sets the Google Drive apart from the features of the storage facility that Google has competing with Dropbox, Microsoft’s SkyDrive, Apple’s iCloud, and Amazon’s Cloud Drive, is its Indian touch.

The centralized management tools, (which help administrators to add or remove storage for individuals or groups), security features (which encompasses encryption of data as well as identity verification), and billing systems were conceptualized and built by the Google Engineering teams in Bangalore and Hyderabad, according to a post on Google India’s blog.

Google Drive (which includes Google Docs now) allows users to share content with others, be it PDF, Photoshop or Illustrator images, video files, and add or reply to comments on any of these types of documents.

Google Search is also built-in, and so you can search for your stored content using a keyword, file name, owner name, etc. One of the most interesting features though, is Optical Character Recognition (OCR) which, for example, instead of treating the text on a scanned document as part of an image, allows you to search for the document using text on the image because the drive recognizes it as text. The inherent image search too aims at helping you search for images you have stored by just dragging and dropping them on the search bar.

But in the face of all these exciting features, Sunder Pichai, the Senior Vice President of Chrome & Apps said in the company’s blog the search technology was only in its initial stages and many more improvements would be made over the course of time.

You can use Drive to work with your overall Google experience, according to the blog. This means you can do anything with it, from attaching photos from Drive to posts in Google+, to attaching content from it to your emails on Gmail directly in the near future.

Since Drive is an open platform, Google’s working with a number of third-party developers to enable functionalities such as sending faxes, editing videos and creating website mock-ups (for example) directly from your stored content on the platform.