Google India ventures into offline search

Durgesh Gupta - Televisionpoint.com | Mumbai
Google, the global leader in Internet search, is embarking on a 360-degree approach to further entrench its India market share, a strategy that would give its competition a nerve-racking time.

The firm is venturing in offline search to expose a much larger audience to the pleasures of 'Googling', it intends to graduate them to the online space over time.

Google is currently running a pilot in Hyderabad and Delhi for phone search, the traditional information hunting model where you can dial a toll free number for answers. While phone and online search addresses two ends of the audience spectrum, the middle slot is being filled by mobile search, an area that is expected to generate exciting monetisation opportunities.

Today, there are 50 million people online. But they are 300 million who use mobile phones, a simple measure that makes information delivery in this medium important.

"However, lot of this 300 million does not speak English. Today, they don't understand why they should be on the Internet and what it can do. By exposing the power of search in the medium they are currently comfortable with, we can expand the market," Vinay Goel, products head, Google India, says.

People using voice search may eventually start using SMS search before moving online. The phone search is a new product but Google does have an incarnation even in the US where it is called Goog-4111. It's a completely automated system, based on voice recognition. However, in India, the firm will invest in a mix of human intervention and automation since there is regional variance in accents.

How successful the firm will be in moving people up the search value curve and in its favour may be speculative as of now. However, Google does have growing competition in mobile search. It is a new area where people, thus far, have primarily been searching for restaurants and movie timings. Since mobile search appears to be local, there is room for local players who have got the indexing right. Some Indian search engines already provide SMS and mobile-optimised online search. More will follow.

VC-funded Zook, for instance, is a mobile-only search engine with an ability to search across the Web with or without data connectivity. The firm has been able to accumulate data from multiple sources. While it crawls pages and buys data from a dozen odd partners, it also harnesses the 'wisdom of the crowds' to generate responses. Queries its search engine does not have an answer to gets forwarded to a community, what has popularly come to be known as 'croud sourcing'.

"We target exact answers rather than Web pages. We index the informative part, not the descriptive part of the page. By limiting our focus, we are able to do better analysis of the pages. You can get to the answer faster." Dr Ajay Sethi, founder, Zook says.

The firm has an advertisement platform for inserted image-based and text ads. However, the money is not significant now. "No advertiser has allocated big budgets to mobile advertising. We hope by 2011, mobile ads could be a $ 10 billion market," he says.

Even for Google, the masters of online monetisation, making money on the phone is not a priority right now. While text and voice-based ad insertions in SMS and phone search respectively are possibilities, Google currently prefers understanding customer behaviour and the types of information they want.

"Both the SMS and phone search pieces are young. Google's strategy is to ensure mass adoption and then we will figure out how to make money," Vinay Goel says.