[Reader-list] India's First Search Engine
Kiran Jonnalagadda
jace at pobox.com
Sun Oct 15 09:57:47 IST 2006
Yes, Tapas,
So you do agree context makes the difference. This is a crucial bit
that many of these sites seem to have missed.
Who is "India" a community to? The site's creators, or the users? To
which of these parties does India being a single, unified community
become important to?
For an e-commerce site, it's straightforward. India is (more or less)
a single market with a common currency and common jurisdiction for
certain classes of trade. It makes sense for an e-commerce site to be
India focused. Users don't particularly care about where the site is
hosted or what countries other users come from, as long it accepts a
local currency and delivers quick and cheap (buying off Amazon vs
FabMall, for eg).
For a matrimonial site, while there are no operational barriers to
serving the entire world, users specifically want to interact with
other Indians, for reasons that run deeper than the site can hope to
influence. Therefore it makes sense for the site to be India focused.
(It is also worth noting that these sites are marriage focused,
whereas elsewhere in the world they would be dating sites; dating
sites have fared poorly in India.)
So either the nature of operations should draw limits corresponding
to the borders of India, or users should specially seek "Indianness".
What, then, does one make of a site like Yaari.com, which hopes to be
the Indian MySpace?
1. Are there operational difficulties to being global?
2. Do Indians want to restrict their online social circles to other
Indians, or do they at least want to segregate Indians in their
social circle from everyone else?
Both appear a clear No to me. So what does Yaari hope will
differentiate itself? The desi flavour? The CEO, Prerna Gupta,
explains this is indeed so [1]. What, then, makes for "flavour"? The
colours used on the site? The language of messages in the interface
(a la PutVote.com)? Or the people you get to meet on the site?
Surely the latter trumps all other forms of desi flavour? But surely
your Indian friends are already talking to you on Orkut, MySpace,
LiveJournal and a host of other spaces? So why would they move? Is an
improvement over Orkut's scraps, one piece of the functionality,
sufficient justification?
Or does Yaari hope they'll entice you with the prospect of running
into a fellow Indian no matter which random profile you pick? But do
people actually visit random profiles so much? Is it not the case
that after you've used Orkut, MySpace, LiveJournal, even Ryze for a
while, pretty much anything on the site seems a familiar corner,
because these sites are constructed to deliver you a personal
universe that contains what you want it to contain?
(I posted to this list on the same lines in relation to LiveJournal,
last August).
How does Yaari hope to break this spell then, by merely being
"Indian" flavoured? Or is all the talk about being Indian only meant
to be a media hook, to get the attention of reporters seeking an
Indian angle to the story, because *their* publications, owing to
operational constraints and community formed by extent of political
jurisdiction, are limited to India?
~j
[1] http://www.tech2.com/india/news/websites/desi-social-networking-
site-yaari-com-debuts/2271/0
On 14/Oct/2006, at 9:45 PM, t.ray at vsnl.com wrote:
> Aman, Anamika and Kiran,
>
> I think India *can* be seen as a comunity if you go by one of the
> broader definitions from COD: "the people of an area or country
> considered collectively".
>
> The problem with Shivam's thinking, in my understanding, is that he
> seems to be mixing up the search engine as an instrument for
> locating pages with certain characteristics specified by the user,
> with the internet's characteristics as a seamless information
> space. In other words, it's a confusion between two analytical levels.
>
> I haven't had time to check out guruji's functionality, but I do
> wish they would use another name. The present one seems to have too
> strong a reference to the Hindu (and Hindi) tradition. That might
> offend some sensibilities. However, it is a private company and its
> owners have a right to name it the way they want as long as it's
> not against the law ... don't ask me which law, Indian or the law
> of any country where the net is accessible, because I can't even
> begin to answer that one.
>
> Best,
>
> Tapas
>
>
>
>> I think the more interesting bit is, when they describe something as
>> "Indian so and so", exactly what does "Indian" mean here?
>>
>> The most typical use is when some site claims to be a replica of a
>> more famous site "for the Indian community", which begs the question:
>> is India a community?
>>
>> Usually, not. The typical Indian doesn't go online to meet other
>> Indians. They are likelier to go looking for like-minded people under
>> more specific categorisation, like people who are in the same
>> profession as them, have similar political views, similar ethnic
>> background, or otherwise. "India" is too broad to appeal here. A site
>> may as well serve all Internet users worldwide but figure out how to
>> present a personalised view to each user depending on what they are
>> likely to be interested in.
>>
>> India does become a valid community in the context of a matrimonial
>> site owing to the peculiarities of this tradition, but regional
>> communities are even stronger, accounting for the spate of regional
>> matrimonial sites, and the clear categorisation in pan-India sites.
>> Here it is a tussle between community identity and brand recall.
>>
>> On the other hand, when a site like 70mm seeks to replicate NetFlix
>> in "India", they are referring to the geographical and legal region
>> of India. This too is a valid category. The dynamics of distributing
>> movies from India to India is very different from distribution from
>> India to Pakistan, Bangladesh or Sri Lanka (or from NetFlix in the US
>> to customers in India).
>>
>> Summary: making an India-specific site for reason of the dynamics of
>> doing business in India is good, while being India-specific because
>> you think your users will want to restrict themselves to that is bad.
>>
>> Witness how there are several successful examples of e-commerce sites
>> in India, while practically none of search engines or social
>> networking sites.
>>
>> At the moment, neither Raftaar nor Guruji appear to have any edge
>> over Google. Their results may be more relevant, but that is not
>> sufficient. They don't do worldwide searches, so one still has to use
>> Google for that, and when India-specific results are needed, it's
>> easier to check the box in Google than to remember to use a wholly
>> different website with a new UI (the pages may appear similar, but UI
>> is more than just appearance).
>>
>> Raftaar's USP is that they can read and index pages that use an
>> encoding scheme other than Unicode. This is valid, but not sufficient
>> to give them traction, and will only work while there's a
>> sufficiently large userbase for such sites, and only until Google
>> implements the same. In other words, it's a dead end street.
>>
>> Kiran
>>
>>
>> On 13/Oct/2006, at 7:21 PM, Anamika Bhatnagar wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Hi
>>>
>>> Even I tend to agree with Tapas. We need to be careful with the
>>> words we use...I see nothing wrong in having an Indian search
>>> engine. Agreed there may be marketing stunts involved and the fact
>>> that both the founders are from IIT and want to use it for
>>> branding...I see nothing wrong in it...why call it an IIT publicity
>>> stunt?!
>>>
>>> It is not even on their front page...of guruju.com staring into our
>>> eyes saying it has been made by two IITians. It is there in their
>>> biographies. If they don't put it there, where will they put it?
>>>
>>> anamika.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Kiran Jonnalagadda
>> http://jace.seacrow.com/
>
> _________________________________________
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--
Kiran Jonnalagadda
http://jace.seacrow.com/
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