Looking for a 24-hour pharmacy or a pet food store near your locality? Or are you looking for a maid agency in your city?
Bangalore-based Four Interactive soft-launches local search engine
MUMBAI: Looking for a 24-hour pharmacy or a pet food store near your locality? Or are you looking for a maid agency in your city?
To search for local information like these, our usual, first port of call are friends and relatives, followed by “yellow pages”. And now, with net
penetration increasing, internet is fast becoming a preferred medium.
The race to corner the biggest mindshare in local search has begun in India, too, in line with the global trend. Earlier this week, Bangalore-based startup Four Interactive soft-launched the Mumbai channel of its local search engine asklaila.com.
This is the second city after Bangalore that the company has launched its local search engine. Other fledgling horizontal and vertical local search engines are guruji.com, local.google.com, and burrp.com.
“We are bringing a search engine that is multi dimensional. It is not just a ‘look-up’ search but also contextual. Here people can search on attributes, something not provided by the generic search engines,” co-founder Shriram Adukoorie told DNA Money.
Hence asklaila.com allows users to search on specifics like “mobile repair shop” and allow them to specify the localities. “We have covered 650 different localities in greater Mumbai, which includes Thane and New Bombay,” he said.
However the search is still not very refined. When this corresponded tried to search for a Nokia service station in Kharghar (a suburb in Navi Mumbai), the two results that the search threw up were of bike dealers in
Grand Road , a good 50 kms from the requested destination.
The company launched the Bangalore leg of its search engine in August 2007. “We took time to launch in Mumbai because of the time taken create the data ground up. Our data is live and we update over 1,000 records a week,” Co-Founder Kiran Konduri claimed, refusing to disclose the number of entries the company’s database has.
Kondari is a serial entrepreneur, having co-founded Zephyr Software (acquired by Infospace) and Cogniti. His partner Shriram has worked with Microsoft for a decade, launching MSN in India. One of the venture capital representatives on asklaila’s boards is Bejul Somaia, who had started a local search engine company Open List in the US.
Venture funded to the tune of $12 million for an undisclosed stake by Matrix Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and SVB India in two quick rounds of funding, asklaila.com is looking at tapping the estimates $200 million local search advertising market, which includes yellow pages, directories, and some business2business publications.
After Mumbai, the next cities on Asklaila’s radar are Delhi and Hyderabad.
“In this business, you have scale up. We have plans to be in 33 cities over the next 12 months. We should be in the top six cities by the middle of this year,” Konduri said. He claims that he has raised enough funds for the entire rollout.
“We are not in a hurry to monetise our search results. This is a long-drawn game and our investors also understand that,” Shriram said.
g_rabin@dnaindia.net
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