Local Search in India: Search Relevance and Experience.

Search in India has a unique problem. Most Localities in India are words in local languages. When written in English, there are multiple ways of representing the same word. Resolving all these spellings to that particular location is a non-trivial task. Most search engines at the moment do not do such resolution and a few like Onyomo and Burrp have taken the easy way out by giving a drop down of localities the moment the user starts typing in the locality names. Guruji resolves locations to some extent but still has a long way to go. Justdial doesn’t resolve locations at all and looks for direct matches.

Beyond this, Local Search suffers from all other problems that are common to a categorized directory search ranging from inadequate keyword and category aliases to incorrect categorization to search tuning by category parameters. Technically, a site like Ilaakaa wouldn’t even qualify as a Local Search site because their search merely uses the Indiacom Yellow Pages search.

Since the key to success lies largely in the comprehensiveness and searchability of the data, many of the Local Search players don’t seem to have invested much time or effort on user experience and navigation. Justdial with the best data has one of the poorest user experiences on the site. Onyomo and Burrp have the best user experience and navigation among all the sites, with minimum clutter and ordered presentation.