Local Search Engine Tie Ups in 2007, An Overview
With local search engines spurting out on a regular basis we have been able to observe certain interesting trends in their strategies over 2007.
Here’s a look at some tie ups and mergers that were significant enough to catch our attention. The local search engine market is now huge and here to stay contributing 25% to the total revenue from search engines worldwide. With so many options to search on and the stiffening competition, leveraging local players to boost your number of users seems to be the formula.
The race to form tie ups and started early this year with Guruji.com looking for funding to go regional and mobile in six cities across India. This was mentioned in our earlier post. Mid 2007, Onmoyo tied up with Big FM, a Reliance owned radio service to offer its services on local search through the 5454 SMS service. It expanded its search functions and users could now search for restaurants, movies, florists, hotels, bookstores, coffee shops, electronic gadgets, and more. At about the same time MIH came up with Dwaar, a search engine that supported searches on five main categories: Search India, Cities, Restaurants, Jobs, and Matrimony.
Burrp, an interesting and resourceful engine for searches involving mainly restaurants and cuisines decided to go mobile to keep up with its competition. The new service, though irritating at times let users receive SMS updates on restaurants and night clubs.
Nokia too followed suit with a rather homogenous service across India, Malayasia, Singapore, Philippines and Thailand. It simply collated information from content providers like Yellow pages and Info media and tied up with MSN live and Yahoo to be the web search providers.
Bangalore was fortunate enough to find its own local search engine; AskLaila a 4interactive initiative. With so many players already in the market this was yet another attempt to capitalize on the growing local search engine market. Guruji in a rather ambitious attempt to increase traffic started its search to win contest, however the attempt wasn’t a huge hit as per us because most users stuck to Google while carrying out their regular searches and only logged on to Guruji only to take part in the contest. What needs to be seen is whether Guruji managed to retain any of the users post the contest. Also the quality of search results through Guruji wasn’t really at par with Google.
Google, the big Baap of search engines wasn’t going to merely sit and watch so it decided to foray into the budding local Indian search engine market and launched its Google India labs and Google local search engine for India. Google, obviously known for its consistency and the premiere search engine has given the other players a run for their money.
Reliance has supported quite a few of these search ventures to strength its search features through its telecom service and tied up with Sulekha.com and Mkhoj to offer its services in the Mumbai and Pune market. Google kept up with the pace and launched its SMS service that could be used on even the primitive mobile handsets, a brilliant example of Google’s ability to utilize simplicity and penetrate users. The final trimester in 2007 saw some major tie ups with info service based companies to boost the quality of local search services. Yahoo went about with a range of mergers and tie ups and even dared to challenge and openly compare themselves with Google. BSNL, BPL Mobile, Aircel Limited and a host of other players across Asia were roped in as well. Google on the other hand extended its local search features through a tie up with Holiday IQ. Users could go about planning their vacations through Indian hotel reviews, photographs, resorts, accommodation, home-stays and user database. In a major tie up with Infomedia yellow pages Guruji went about increasing its credit.
A few insights
Local search services have matured thorough 2007 and hold great potential for further growth and refinement of services. An important issue is the functionality of these search engines because at the end of the day the user needs to find the information he is looking for. I tried to do a few searches while writing this post and certain unknown engines like Byindia.com couldn’t even come up with the details for a restaurant as popular as Mc Donalds only for Mumbai. While it was easy to find the mention of the restaurant, not a single link was informative enough if I had to actually go looking for the restaurant.
In terms of business both advertisers and service providers stand at to gain big time. With the advent of introduction of multimedia based review websites in the future, the user stands to benefit. It would be amazing if the development of such services is quickened.
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Onyomo has been spelled as Onmoyo in your article above.
Interesting list
I have seen Yulop coming up very strong, these guys are been silent killers and recently they ahve added up 50k listing fro bangalore, in observance of Asklaila also being only to bangalore, Yulop’s Cityfind can beat them in every way, they have geomapped and have greta going, i heard they are expanding to 6 cities
check http://cityfind.yulop.com