Online and Mobile Local Search In India
By Kamla Bhatt • Aug 3rd, 2007Category: Ideas, India, Technology, User Generated Content
Local search appears to be the latest buzz word and in-thing in India. There are quite a few companies either in stealth mode or have already announced their services. This is not to forget the efforts in this area by Yahoo, AOL and others.
The question I have is: how are Indian companies defining local search? When they say that they are a local search company is their service driven by algorithms bots and their version of a secret sauce or are these companies creating new local content or are they an online yellow directory?
Local search stumbles in USA, where many companies are working on this problem. So, it is not surprising to hear that there are many challenges for local search to work effectively in India. If you factor in the lack of data, maps, tools etc. it is not surprising to hear that getting a consistent response for all your local search can be a disappointing experience. I suspect that is why there is a huge market in India, and local search in India is going to have a huge human input element. So does this mean there a market for user generated content in this space to make up for the lack of content and information?
My question is that why do companies label themselves as local search when in fact in many cases they are a huge repository of yellow pages and the telephone directory?
Am I missing something something here? Do you think there is an untapped market for vertical local search in India? What has your experience been with local search?
Hi Kamla,
A timely post because there are lots of great companies out there trying to solve this problem as best they can. While there are different approaches adopted by different companies, it is important to understand what makes some of them different or unique or more useful than the rest.
Rather than plug my company here and say my baby is best, I shall do my best to help provide an overview of different local search offerings.
Firstly, there are a few different local search approaches on the web/mobile:
a) One is the Yellow Pages approach. This is more like a vanilla directory listing. You can find the contact details of businesses you are looking for.
b) The second is the “Local Social Search” approach. This is a super-set of the former and also allows you to leverage the social graph of communities to find more relevant answers. For eg., if you are looking for a doctor in your city, wouldn’t it be useful if you found those doctors who your friends have reviewed rather than just the address of the doctor? “Local social search” companies have some way of forming a social graph – either explicitly thru’ a social network or implicitly thru’ page ranks, etc.
c) There is a third approach which is editorial in nature. For eg., get paid writers to go review various businesses. The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t scale well. Just imagine the editors you need to have on your rolls to review all of the businesses in your city!
d) The fourth approach is that of aggregation. Basically, take data from a whole lot of other offerings and present it in one place.
Now, whatever approach you take amongst the ones listed above, there are more differentiators as well:
1) What is the coverage of cities of the local search offering? Do you cover 2 cities, 3 cities or 100 cities.
2) What is the coverage in terms of categories? Are you helping people find information on just hotels or even information across categories such as hospitals, car dealers, realtors and so on?
3) Maps as you rightly mentioned. Can you find the location of businesses on a map like they do in the US for example?
4) Local search is much more than just finding details of businesses. Many a times, you want opinions or suggestions from others. So, another differentiator is whether the local search offering allow you to post questions to your community? For eg, if you’d like some information on a concert in your city or even a particular swimming club, can you post a question and get an answer from your community.
5) Information on local events. This is not related to businesses, but it is something that is useful to people in a particular city.
6) Other important local offerings include local classifieds, local deals, etc.
So, when measuring different “local” offerings, one really has to look a little deeper before judging the product. Otherwise, you’d brush all the local search companies as the same thing. A bicycle and a Merc can potentially take you from place A to place B. There are advantages/disadvantages to either of them. But both of them are definitely not the same
Rithesh
Ideasmith – tolmolbol.com
Hi Kamala,
A well written and timely post as always. Yesterday only i was listening to your podcast with the founders from guruji.com and today this post
My opinion on the local search is pretty much inline with the views these companies have and also inline with Rithesh’s views.
1.) I believe the search market has a huge potential because of the changing behavioral patterns.
2.) I believe site like guruji .com and burrp.com will do better because of the focus they have on city specific content.
3.) To me local search starts where yellow pages ends. You not only get the information about a restaurant let’s say in MG Road but also what the janta has to say abt it. This really will make the local search market grow.
Thanks
Vaibhav
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Rithesh:
Thanks for your excellent overview and analysis of the Indian local search market.
Thanks for putting the various flavors of local search in variois bins…my question is can there be a fifth bind that has elements of the various flavors? That is paid writers, user generated free content etc. etc? I am thinking aloud here since India is a probably a challenging market to do local.
You hit the nail on the head with the bicycle and Merc analogy.
Vaibhav:
Thanks for listerning to the Guruji podcast.
Interesting way of putting that search starts where yellow pages end…so user generated content and input is a key ingredient for local search like you point out.
Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts and input on this very interesting topic of what constitues local search in India.
Kamla
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