Search masters

A study by the Internet and Mobile Association of India says there are around 65 million people who use search engines in India and the current size for search engine advertising is $50 million. This will get doubled in the next couple of years. Swati Rahate, service manager, Justdial explains, “90 per cent of Internet search queries are local in nature and thus the need for local search engines is evident. Justdial is very local in nature and provides customers with relevant search results.”

Burrp is another social lifestyle search engine and reviews website that has launched its service in the city. It is looking to add local flavour in each city they launch in, like for Pune they have also allowed users to locate, review and recommend Pune’s famous home-run Irani bakeries, snack shops and college canteens along with normal restaurants and hang-outs. They have earlier launched in Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Delhi. “Built on a distributed architecture that can scale with the growing needs of the users, search engines’s complex computing system crawls the web to identify local content, indexes the data and provides a simple keyword-based interface to access the information instantly,” says Rahul Pethekar from Burrp, simplifying the complex software programme that goes behind scanning the web world for local needs.

With more and more companies vying to be noticed in Internet search results, the local search engine industry seems to have a lot to look forward to. So stop worrying about reference books, job openings and start thinking about keywords that can make your search easy!