HYDERABAD: Global Internet search giant Google Inc on Thursday announced plans to hire 300 people to double its engineering headcount in India and strengthen Hyderabad as its largest cloud computing research and development centre in the world.

The firm plans to recruit 300 engineers in couple of years to increase its presence in India with focus on cloud computing.

Peeyush Ranjan, head of engineering, Google India , told reporters here that 300 engineers were already working in Hyderabad and Bangalore on cloud computing.

Cloud computing is web-based processing, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices such as smart phones on demand over the Internet.

Google already has cloud computing centres in Mountain View in California and New York but the Hyderabad centre is the largest in terms of the number of engineers working here.

Google already has 2,000 employees in India and the Hyderabad engineering centre will be core to its efforts to focus on cloud computing, he said.