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
- Organize the information available online with a strong local understanding – so we deliver results that are most relevant to us, the Indians.
- 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.
- 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.
Ashish Sinha