Comments on: Community driven local search marching ahead.

By: iLeher » Whet your appetite with Foodiebay.com Catching the Internet Wave in India

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 06:09:56 +0000

[...] Generally I found the site quite pleasing and all the basics are covered. Deepinder says that their biggest USP is the menu for EACH restaurant listed on the site. And I tend to agree. It is really nice to have a glance at the original menu card. Out of the other players in this space, most notable is hungryzone.com, if we discount “everything local” plays like burrp and other community driven local search sites. Foodiebay definitely wants to go where hungryzone is today in terms of features. Hungryzone seems to have larger presence with lot of features like ordering food or make a reservation, done using Zook. What makes foodiebay so interesting is the amount of traffic it is generating as per Alexa in such a short amount of time. Take a look at the following graph. It seems like these guys have caught up to hungryzone already and looking good. I have put burrp & yepme in there to compare the niche play against broader ones. [...]

By: Rockstar

Rockstar — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 11:26:53 +0000

Tolmol seems to be the only site with Comparing Airfare & Trainfare,Local Offers etc…Looks good.

By: Vivek Garg

Vivek Garg — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 00:34:11 +0000

I dont think these sites are related. but i could be wrong. But I will let Rithesh verify that.

By: Sameer

Sameer — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 23:44:37 +0000

Hello,
Can someone tell me if tolmolbol is owned by tolmol.com - a indian price comparison shopping site similar to bechna.com.

Also, can you do a study of alexa/hitwise rankings for the shopping space like rediff, fabmall, etc as well as shopping comparison sites like bechna, tolmol, prisb, ultop, etc.

Thanks!
Sameer

By: Vivek Garg

Vivek Garg — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 05:07:07 +0000

A very interesting read related to local search.

How Much Is ‘Local Search’ Really Worth?

By: Vivek Garg

Vivek Garg — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 18:35:34 +0000

Kanika - The point is to compare traffic between these sites across all toolbar installations. Burrp being in two cities and still neck to neck with iLaaka can mean few things
1. there are more installations in mumbai and bangalore and rest of the cities did not count too much.
2. burrp has more traffic just from two cities than the combined traffic to ilaaka.

I agree with Ritesh. To really do such analysis we need an india focused alexa. This seems like a good opportunity. May be Venture Intelligence can come to the rescue.

By: Rithesh Prasad

Rithesh Prasad — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 07:23:49 +0000

Vivek:

Thanks for mentioning that tolmolbol is a new site. We have not been public for the full period covered by this analysis.

BTW, I really doubt that enough India-based users use the Alexa toolbar. IMHO, it would be really cool if some reputable organization could perform a real-world field-study of random internet users “in India” and analyse how many of them have the Alexa toolbar installed.

Cheers,
Rithesh

By: Vish

Vish — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 06:49:13 +0000

There are a number of angles to this local search thing. First you have just search results for things like restaurants, events, and so forth.(I’ll call them ‘locals’).Then you have reviews for some of these ‘locals’.The first can be easily generated from a number of sources (infomedia, YP, etc).The second depends on your network and its willingness to generate reviews. The third angle naturally comes from the ability of your network to provide the results for the ‘locals’.
All of these, IMO, are just information much like the info a tourist gets provided by the tourist office or online. I think the bottomline is that i need information…i.e. where can I find a restaurant. I really don’t care how I get it. And if it gets good reviews, its even better.
Now coming to my point of a sustainable business model of such sites, that may not be easy to achieve.(and lets not just talk of eyeballs here).So its gonna be interesting to see who’s got the killer business model.
(this is really turning out to be a grey monday:)

By: kanika

kanika — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 04:53:21 +0000

i am admittedly a burrp fan, but i must point out a mistake in your logic - burrp is only live in two cities whereas ilaaka is live in a bunch of cities. are you really comparing apples to apples here?

By: Sameer Shisodia

Sameer Shisodia — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 04:03:03 +0000

Wow - the timing of this piece really works out for us We’ve been convinced of this combination of content+community for a while now, and its finally manifested itself as Zook, which is being widely launched this week (SMS on 3030, or WAP/GPRS - http://zook.in) More at http://www.zivasoftware.com/blog/2007/03/01/zookin-is-live/

Its true that despite google, and a gazillion other search and vertical engines, one finally gets a lot many answers from one’s network. At Zook we’re trying to make interacting with that network more efficient, and the search engine itself plugs in more or less as one of your contacts (it even asks your questions to help narrow down based on what you asked, not a per-defined taxonomy). Our belief is that this combination is what will drive real world usage of search tools, especially on the go.