www.indiawiz.com

On my trip last 2 weeks, I found that to search anything locally in India is a huge problem, like for example where is the nearest pizza joint in Green park Delhi, or which restaurant would be open late in Cannaught place or where is the local branch office / ATM for a bank. I even tried to search via Google and could not find any result, hence I agree that local search engines are a must for India and to see them sprout everywhere is great.

BUT, BUT, BUT, the problem with all these search engines is still the same, they do not provide the local results. There are many sites that have recently popped up, JustDial, Guruji, Dwaar, AskLaila, OnYoMo etc, most of them relying on same underlying data provider, but whats the USP in here ? They still do not provide what they tout they do.

I do not mind paying for such search results, as long as they do what they say, provide relevant results for the queries done. In India, if one could SMS and get the results on their mobile, this could be a great service, but with the current data in the search engines, I think they have a long way to go. I am sure its a tedious process to gather all this information and then protect the same, but if thats what your business model is, then you gotta do what you gotta do.

Even Google saw this tempting and jumped in the game with Local Google India, its still better then the others sites as mentioned above. Poor VCs who funded all these sites in anticipation that likes of Google and Yahoo would buy them. I wonder why did Rediff, Sify and IndiaTimes not venture in this? It would have been a perfect fit for Rediff and Sify. May be because they never worked on innovative ideas of their own, they had to wait for someone else to do it and then try and copy and mimik them, but now its too late. Even Google Local is not perfect, I searched for “Hospital” in “Delhi” and after a few pages of results, the return from Google was for businesses that remotely may be associated with hospitals, thus there is a lot of room for improvement still.

I would love to see Google launch the SMS service in India, where users could SMS like we do here in States and get top 2 results in return via sms, as this would make life much easier in India. OnYoMo may be trying to do the same thing, my suggestion to them, hurry before its too late.

-IndianWizard