I wanted an easy way to check the availability of domains! So, we installed our own script. Now we can check domain availability for even 10 domains at a same time. No images, no ads, no unwanted stuff on the page. Just the textbox and the submit button. We prefer to keep it simple!
If this suits your needs, feel free to use it.
Two months ago, we launched a very ‘dynamic’ section called “Antya Pulse”. You can think of this page as a kind of dashboard where you can monitor the user activity happening in Antya. The activities that you can track now include the following:
Website getting discovered: Websites that are visited by Antya users recently.
What’s being Searched for: The queries or topics accessed by Antya users recently.
User Suggestions: The websites that are recommended by the users.
Recent Ratings: Websites that are rated recently.
Recent Comments: User opinions or views about the website/business/brand.
It’s fascinating to see the user activity that’s happening in Antya from a single page. Go check it out and let us know how we can improve this further!
Though we haven’t gathered tons of data/statistics to accurately predict the user behaviour, we have gathered some level of data which has given us little clue about the kind of user queries. Since Antya is fairly SEO’ed, we have been receiving leads from major search engines. We do observe those stats - what kind of queries people type in other search engines and how they land up to Antya - What are the other results presented alongside our link - What is the quality of the other links…and the list goes on. But it’s fascinating to just observe the new queries/referrals coming in every few seconds in our stats page.
Some observations from the leads received from major search engines:
* Quite a few navigational queries (People typing the url like www.yahoo.com, www.avmrajeswari.in etc.,). Very very surprising and dont have any explanation for this. A small tip on search engine advertising: Do bid on the keywords which represent an url and make multiple variations of the same. You get to bid low and receive reasonable number of hits.
* Spelling Variations/mistakes of an entity/brand/product/service.
* “Business + Locality” form of query. E.g, “XYZ in chennai”, “ABC Coaching institute, New Delhi”, “How to do XYZ in ABC”, “Present value of an apartment in locality” etc.,
* The usage of “+” operator has almost come to zero. Occasionally we spot some queries with advanced search operators like “Site:”, “cache:”, “link:” etc.,
I have 100 more observations to share…May be I will do it in the coming weeks once we have completed the pending stuff. At Antya, we do realize the power of long-tail 
It’s been 6 months since we have made Antya publicly available. So far, we have added 100,000 websites to Antya. Partly researched through our in-house editors and partly recommended by our loyal userbase.
The quality of sites that has been added to Antya has not been compromised in order to reach our targets/numbers. We do not encourage any spam sites, sites with abusive conten, circular-network sites, blogs hosted on public blogging engine as of now. (I will come to the blogs part little later). It’s important the users know what kind of sites Antya loves so that they contribute/recommend accordingly…
1. We love Internet-startups, any legitimate business that are based purely on internet/online. Examples include search engines, social sites, portals, authority sites on any vertical topics, online advertising, ecommerce, online directories etc.,
2. We love websites of SMBs and local businesses. Any offline company having an online presence. Examples include hair salons, dentists, Sports coaching, Fitness centres, Exporters, Textile shops, Handicrafts, travel agents etc.,
3. We love corporate websites. Examples include Nike, Reliance, Tata, ICICI etc.,
Since our focus has been primarily on websites, we have not considered blogs as a candidate. But going by the number of recommendations that we receive about various blogs, we are more and more pushed to start a separate section for blogs. We would announce about that sub-domain shortly.
The title of the post might give an impression that Antya is about local search..but don’t get misleaded! In this post, I will discuss the problems faced by Indian Local search engines and possible solutions to those problems.
The addresses in India is very unstructured, with atleast half-a-dozen variations for each and every address. Incosistent abbreviations, spelling mistakes, complicated structure for door numbers, changing addresses, changing phone numbers, changing city names(!), non-functional numbers..and the list goes on…
The Local search engines has the onus of first gathering the corpus of business addresses across India. After completing such a difficult task, local search products should update the databases to keep track of all the changes in business addresses. On top of this, when someone searches for say “Schools in delhi”…the local search products doesn’t have a clue which one to show first and which one to show last. The concept of keyword relevancy doesn’t help local search, as there are bound to be tens or hundreds of records having same relevancy!
The local search product isn’t complete unless it does an intelligent job of proximity search (Search ‘nearby’ facility) and unless it provides the details of Maps and directions! Talk about Maps, India doesn’t have a detailed and accurate online maps yet…MapMyIndia has been doing a stupendous job on that front and Reliance & co is working on a giant project to sketch every inch on India in digital maps! But there is a long way to go as far as online maps are concerned.
How can someone bring structure to this insane situation? Near Impossible!
A simplistic approach seems to solve this problem to an extent, if not 100%! Instead of local search companies taking the onus of maintaining accurate address, place the onus on the business owners. Educate them to have website…Even help them create one with little difficulty. Let the businesses update the addresses in their website regularly. For them, it is just a single place to change…Distribute the work among the business owners! Sounds simple..but ambitious effort!
As a search product, we simply redirect to their web page containing the contact details…Thinking about this, this approach makes sense for yet another reason. In online world, there is no scope for touch-and-feel. The nearest touch-and-feel that one can get is to visit the website and dig the information! If there are ratings and reviews available about the business, even better! Most of the times, people will seek for numbers from telephone directories or from mobile-based solutions like Justdial.com. The need there is all about quick access to phone numbers/addresses. The remaining crowd who has come online to look for businesses, will be mighty pleased if they can visit the website first (Imagine visiting the menu section of restaurant, booking a room from hotel website, browsing the product catalogue of retail store website, getting to know about discounts and deals in the shopping mall website)
So, encouraging every business to have a website/webpage and to redirect to the respective websites as a search product makes some sense….
Thought Antya is not about local search, it has the potential to solve the problem of Indian local search by harnessing the simplistic approach mentioned above!
Would love to discuss/brainstorm on the approach mentioned. Please leave your views and I will reply.
In India, Local Search is the buzzword. The next “big opportunity.” Every startup or established search player has its eyes on it – with a plethora of local search engines already hitting the Indian market with varying degrees of successes from the likes of Guruji, Onyomo, Ask Laila, Srch.in, Justdial, Samfra, Mudku, dwaar (at least a part of it), to bigger players like Google, Rediff, and Yahoo! In all this fight, Yellow Pages companies stand to gain. Ditto for mapping companies! For the only other way of acquiring data is the less-treaded and often time-consuming path of aggregating data from the streets and taking up the mammoth task of refreshing them periodically. But this is assuming that vast chunks of information in India are largely offline. But is it so? Does the web generally lack local info? Can’t we simply fulfill our simple, local needs online?
By local info, we don’t mean the enhanced version by Google, Yahoo! that also provide maps, social connectivity to research local info such as restaurants, car rentals, groceries, etc.; just results for generic searches that fulfills our local needs. One Antyan was recently going to Canada, and was looking for a pet boarding in Gurgaon for his labrador. “I searched Google for pet boarding gurgaon, but found not-too-convincing results from web directories. What I was looking for was a destination, where I could experiment with the product. Then my friend Rana, suggested I checkout kennel1. I was surprised by its contents and that it was indexed by Google, but not discoverable,” he said. Another specialized query could be Haleem, the famous dish from Hyderabad, and where else can you get better haleem than Pista House?
More commonly, one of our biggest need is Movie tickets. This is something that we look to book online from our offices on weekdays, with no time to go to the Malls or theatres. In most instances, we know there is a PVR, and a DTCinemas, and the latest all-aggregator BookMyShow. But, did you know that there are over 14 movie booking websites in India today ranging from movie theatres to aggregators? We surely didn’t.
The same holds true for most of our other daily local needs be it Restaurants, Bars, Discos, phone numbers of local Police Stations, Dentist, Gym, Shopping Malls, Beauty Salons, Adventure Trips, Jewellery, Couriers, Movers & Packers;, or even destinations of well-known brands like Nike, Proline but India-specific. That would be an ideal local search engine.
There should be an element of discovery too, without any intent, or so we discovered when we tripped over Arambol. “Arambol is a small fisherman village in Goa – India where an Austrian and a Canadian are producing and selling their own designs of hammocks & leisure furniture under the brand name of Arambol Hammocks.” One of their product is flying carpet. Guess we might use one to discover more Indian websites on the web!
While reading articles/news paper/books, certain words catch our attention and linger on in our minds a vie bit more… sharing a couple of them here:
“…When search first started, if you searched for something and you found it, it was a miracle! Now, if you do not get exactly what you want in the first three results, something is wrong…”
Google Search Quality Team. [Original link]
“…If lakhs of small and big businesses (schools, colleges, retail chains, hotels, government services etc etc) do a good job of creating an online presence millions of their consumers will move online as well…”
Hitesh Oberoi, IAMAI Conference [Original link]
The first quote emphasizes the importance of search quality. Over the years, internet consumers have evolved in behaviour, intelligence and ofcourse expectations! Consumers don’t give a damn about the challenges that a search engine faces in terms of combing through billions of web pages, analyzing the same and serving the results. All that the consumers want is to get the results they “want” in the first few results. The onus is now on the search engines to understand the user intent. Excuses aren’t accepted. The standards and benchmarks has been set very high!
The second quote is more relevant to India. Those words stresses the need for more and more offline businesses in India to come ONLINE. Currently, the internet penetration in India is hovering around 2% (approximate estimates from various sources). Unless, there are more businesses coming online, there wouldn’t be any incentive for consumers to come online. If you look at the pattern of internet penetration of India, the penetration is largely driven by Jobs, Matrimonial, Real Estate, Travel, Banking along with Email, dating, chatting and Information Search (among umpteen other segments). If other businesses also move online, consumers also will tend to move online to transact or learn about these businesses and their offerings.
Now when you combine the above two explanations, one point clearly emerges. That the two aspects should evolve parallely and complement each other. The “Search Engines” should set a platform for enabling new businesses to be easily discoverable and thereby encouraging more new businesses to come online.
Our effort is a small-step towards enabling the discovery of new businesses with great ease.
Internet is changing the face of new
The government has now realized that it cannot forever ignore the net. The India Portal and Incredible India are good examples of quality websites. The Indian Rail Ticket Booking site has had a new avatar. People can apply for a PAN Card online for sometime now. Only recently, the Delhi Government woke up to upgrade its website to the India Portal standards than just being a showcase of members of committees.
CBSE has recently allowed its out-of-India candidates to register online for their board exams. Hopefully, the same will be extended to Indians living in
Hmm… looks like the whole of
The whole wikipedia experience is unreal. How can so much information be generated on its own? And not just that, it has a pretty active user community that sees to it that no entry is made that is incorrect or has a marketing/ulterior motive attached to it. While no system can be without flaw, the human angle to search results is something people will look forward to sooner or later. Coz the search engine algorithm has but ‘so many’ parameters to check to ensure quality results. Beyond that what?
Google’s search quality team made an interesting observation in an article in The New York Times recently: “…When search first started, if you searched for something and you found it, it was a miracle! Now, if you do not get exactly what you want in the first three results, something is wrong…” Most of us would agree with this. Unless we are in the research mode, we expect search engines to deliver in the first few results. That means, for a large measure of search queries, you’ve just about 3 slots to impress the user, three legitimate positions to vie for.
