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.
Even i tried it..but somehow not too impressed..
Wondering why they launched a separate brand, and not used the ibibo platform?
-Abhishek
I am a little confused – they hv tried to bring all diff. kinda services under this..
dont know the rationale behind this.
-Prameer
I compared results on JustDial and Dwaar for many queries – one of them being SBI ATM in Chennai, Anna Nagar
In my assessment – JustDial wins in terms of content, Dwaar has better search, better ability to deliver relevance (wherever they have the data) and more options for refining search results.
JustDial has a lot of textual navigation – which is sometimes unnecessary and not my preferred way of getting to information.
The only service that I have used so far that delivers in terms of both is Onyomo.
On an another note, at least three players seem to be wanting to become the search destination in India – Rediff (click on ‘more’ link above their search bar on the homepage), Guruji and now Dwaar.
Lakshmi
I agree with you on JustDial’s one more level of detailing part..but the benefit of this feature is that it will deliver you the exact result.
So for e.g. if you are searching for SBI, you could be looking for SBI Branh or SBI ATM.
But I agree that one would expect the system to figure out these things on behalf of the end user!
-OnYoMo, I tried their service 4 months back and wasn’t too impressed. Let me revisit and check them out..
Google has started providing local search results for India’s main metros using user created contents.
Go to
maps.google.com
and search for “Citibank ATM in Bangalore” or “SBI ATM in Chennai”
Copied from sapne.com for matrimonials
I don’t know what the heck is wrong with these “local search engine” guys. Right from OnYoMo to tolmolbol and even Dwaar.
They must have a REALLY sucky QA/Test team.
The results are completely awry. I was REALLY hoping for better products since I could actually mention my area name (say, Mahim in Mumbai). That was narrowing down too much !! But still I got some really bad results.
Hope these guys test harder before declaring an RC or a Stable release.
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I just stumbled upon the all new dwaar.com. Looks impressive..
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