MIH launches Dwaar, the India specific search service

MIH has launched Dwaar, the India specific search service.

“At Dwaar, our mission is to simplify local & niche information for Indians and empower the community to participate in this process.

We aim to build this holistic search experience through a three pronged approach

1. Organize the information available online with a strong local understanding – so we deliver results that are most relevant to us, the Indians.
2. Expand the search boundary to integrate the “offline India” – so your search is not limited to what’s online but you get to connect with thousands of local businesses, services and professionals who may not have an online presence otherwise.
3. Tap into the collective wisdom of Indians – so you get to compare results based on real experiences of real users, and share your views too. “

Dwaar has 5 categories : Search India, Cities, Restaurants, Jobs, and Matrimony.
From the first look of Dwaar, it seems as if MIH is using the Bixee platform to scrape the content across different sites [‘Jobs’ scrapes Naukri, Monster, TimesJobs, JobsAhead etc; ‘Matrimony’ scrapes jeevansathi,simplymarry and few other sites].

The UI layout is same as Bixee [which in turn seems to be inspired by Google!], the company Naspers/MIH acquired when they entered the Indian market.

As far as India wide search and City search is concerned, I don’t think they have done a good job [search for Citibank ATM in Bangalore yields no result!] ; And that makes me go back to JustDial, the local business search engine (and probably the best, so far).

To summarize:
Dwaar is trying to do too many things from the very beginning. If they get everything right, this has the potential to become an ideal gateway for Indians to India-specific web;
But if not – this will surely be a dent on MIH’s brand [the ibibo platform, even though was promoted with 1.5 crores offers hasn’t taken off in a big way!]

Well, let’s keep the doors [oops..I meant Dwaar] open and wait for more products from MIH.

tagged: Dwaar, ibibo, MIH, JustDial