Local search is the new battle ground for startups and VCs in India. “But, local search is an oxymoron,” says Deepak Srinivasan, Internet marketing guru. “There is no such user experience called local search. It is a local directory business,” he adds. “Local search is often used as a proxy for local points of interest, stores, and so on that is not search — its a directory - like yellow pages. Search I believe is a functionality and an experience when the scale of data is beyond comprehension,” he explains.

So, going by Deepak’s definition the one company that comes to mind is Bangalore-based Zook, which gets its content from Yellow Pages says Sameer Shishodia. “We are scraping the web, partnering with best-of-breed guys and depending on the community for the rest. We are in mobile search space,” adds Sameer, who is a co-founder of Zook.

Last year I wrote a blog post on this topic just before AskLaila unveiled its beta and wondered, “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?” Prior to the launch I was told AskLaila was a local search firm and in fact I had quite a bit of debate with one somebody who works for the startup. When AskLeila unveiled their beta site they called it local information service, which is a better way to describe what they have to offer. AskLaila was one of the first startups in this space that got funded very early on in India and has raised two rounds of funding so far. Zook has also received funding. Then there is TolMolBol, Yulop, ilaaka, Antya and the two big gorillas in the room: Yahoo and Google and to some extent MSN. And then there is Guruji too.

Earlier today I got an email announcing the launch of MetroMela that calls itself an Internet service provider and also publishes a magazine. Internet Service provider reminds me of the 1990s in Silicon Valley when there were a handful of companies that provided dial-up access or POP accounts to users. So, I am not sure how MetroMela is defining that term: Internet Service Provider. Here is how MetroMela has to say about themselves:”first multi-modal, multi-location Internet Services provider…consumers and local businesses discover and transact with each other.” But, that is at the heart of every local search startup’s plan I would think. Certainly if you scratch the surface of TolMolBol, Yulop, ilaaka, Antaya and AskLaila they will have an element of that in their business plan, will they not or am I missing something here.

I guess MetroMela is differentiating itself by launching a magazine based on user generated content. (Sounds a lot like Sulekha that has a large user base content and is publishing 2 books a month featuring their user base.). When I went through MetroMela’s site I was first struck by their logo, which for some inexplicable reason reminds me of the blue Mobile Monday logo. MetroMela is currently offering local search for Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Pune, Vizag, Cochin and Mysore. I guess they are doing a combination of large metro areas and bigger cities in the South. While AskLaila appears to be focused on the metro areas like Bangalore, Delhi NCR, Mumbai and Chennai.

I took a quick tour of MetroMela’s website and decided to some a generic search for “cafe” in Bangalore and Soul Delip Cafe on MG Road tops their list of cafes in Bangalore. I tried the same generic search on AksLaila and got an alphabetic list of cafe starting with “B.” Clearly, AksLaila is following some kind of alphabetic ordering of their list, and I am not sure what is informing the ranking of results for MetroMela.

AskLaila recently added mobile search and I wonder if other local search companies have that in their product roadmap? It seems that mobile is on the radar of most companies. “We have mobile search and we also give maps on your mobile,” says Aashish Solanki, co-founder of Yulop. I asked Aashish how are they different from AskLaila and others and this is what he had to say: “Our content is local, vast and caters to a deeper audience.eg: you may find poojari’s on cityfind. you will find temples and other unconventional listings as well.”

If you step back and take a quick survey of what each company is doing it appears that they are working on a giant jigsaw puzzle and filling in the gaps in creating and providing basic information much like a directory. Some of them are creating their own like AskLaila, others are depending on their users to generate local information and while others appear to be aggregating. But at the end of the day it does seem like they are all working towards building a database of directory information , which is missing in India.

Disclosure: Deepak is also my husband.

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