news . TekChakra.com

Business Standard , has reported the emergence of another local search engine - AskLaila.com - by a company called Four Interactive founded last year in December 2006 by two IIT graduates and about 16 engineers other than about 100 editorial staff. The site claims to give online search a shape never seen before. Currently on Bangalore is covered, with a plan to expand to 22 cities within the next one year. The venture is backed by Matrix Partners, and has very little overlap and similarity with Burrp.com - which is available in 5 cities and whose main focus is on dining, reviews and recommendation and not search.

There also seems to be a flavour of Semantic Search in their methodology, but I may be wrong in saying so - as I need to study the site and model in more detail. “The search can give information for instance on the availability of home-delivered food, place for hair cut, priest or a shop to repair mobile phones or electronic goods with options of zeroing in on the service to the micro level up to the block, phase and even lane level” reports Business Standard. “During the last six months, our mission was to build an algorithm that understands Indian context and also creates a repository of information. For example, our search engine understands that if a person types Geetha in the search bar, then he might be from South India who is searching for the religious scripture,” said Bal Krishna Birla, the CTO of the company, who till recently was heading Amazon Associate Group in Bangalore. Kiran Konduri and Shriram Adukoorie founded the company.

Other local search engines are - Guruji.com (my favourite, funded by Sequoia Capital), Zook.com (mobile search funded by Nadathur), OnYoMo (they need a better name), Dwaar (MIH venture) and JustDial (the highly successful dial in info service now on Web). Click here to see a traffic comparison chart for all. As expected Guruji and JustDial are forging ahead, but probably not yet with very high daily search requests - and at tops about 10,000 to 15,000 daily search queries each.

— Vishal L    Filed under: Search