How will Indian local search startups tackle Google India Initiatives?

Local Indian Search Engines are in for a tough competition. The Big daddy – Google – yesterday announced two new India centric services – Google Local Indian Search Engine and Google local business centre.

The Google Indian local search was online for sometime, but yesterday they announced officially about two new ventures.

A few days back I had written about few local Indian search engines and how each of them are targeting a niche segment of growing Indian Internet users.

Google, with this announcement have created a big competition for Indian local search start-ups. With the launch of this product users will now be able to search for information on local businesses like restaurants, shops, and hotels by simply doing a search on Local.

My initial impressions of Google local search was pretty good, but they will go from good to excellent in no time with the kind of backing and experience they have. Local Google search in US is unmatched even with competition from biggies like yahoo and live.

Like all of their other local searches, Google India search is based on Google maps framework. However, I assume that they do not have the integration in place as yet, but it should not be far off.

The other initiative is the Local business listing, which again is part of local search itself. The Business listings could be added free of cost, but if one has to see his business listed at the top, he has to pay Google.

Here is an excerpt from the Press Release that talks more about the two initiatives:

Google India today announced the launch of an India serving innovation platform, Google India Labs, and two new India facing products- Google Local Search and Google Local Business Centre. The announcement is further evidence of the global search giant’s commitment to providing locally relevant information and opportunities for its Indian users.

Google Local Search promises to be a useful tool for Indian users who are looking for locally relevant information on the web. With the launch of this product users will now be able to search for information on local businesses like restaurants, shops, and hotels by simply doing a search on http://local.google.co.in.

Google Local Business Centre is available at www.google.co.in/local/add and will allow any business to add its information to Google Local for free. When users search on Google Local Search, the listed business information will be displayed. Local Business Centre already exists in other geographies and has provided owners with means to provide visibility to their businesses.

?Local Search and Local Business Centre will provide our users with better local business results by increasing the corpus and depth of business listings, and benefit local businesses by ensuring visibility on the Internet for free,? said Vinay Goel, Head of Products, Google India.

It will be interesting to see how Indian search start-ups tackle Google.