There is some news about Google being in advanced stages of acquisition talks with Yelp.
Many of the Indian users may not be familiar with Yelp or its equivalent CitySearch as such services are not available in India, but mostly confined to US, UK, Canada etc.
Yelp is a local business review site, that allows users to read and contribute reviews about local businesses like restaurants, spas, cinema halls, shops etc. The users can rate the businesses as well as leave elaborate reviews. Their reviews in turns can themselves be rated so as to ensure that quality reviews are displayed more prominently.
Google has been aggressive with local businesses integration recently. They have a similar facility integrated with Google Maps called Google places and they recently pushed out Google favourite places as another way of highlighting the feature.
Google also has an official android application called Google places directory that lets one view local businesses that are near your current location. That to me is the big driver for acquiring Yelp. Google wants more data that it can feed to Google places directory as that application has a huge potential and also a business case. like most other local business driven Location based services have.
Sadly, neither the data nor the services like these are readily available in India. With Google set to acquire Yelp, I am sure someone enterprising would come forward and build a good database of local business reviews, if for nothing else than to be acquired by Google.
Why do you think we do not have a good alternative to Yelp or CitySearch in India? ? Is Indian local business/ net penetration not good enough to make a use case for such businesses? Why do you think Yelp has not expanded in India and with Google moving aggressively in this sphere do you foresee such reviews being available at your fingertips in near future?
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Author: Sandy
Sandeep Gautam is a telecom software professional and a wannabe entrepreneur. He is passionate about web2.0 as well as psychology and neuroscience. You can find him here http://my2brains.wordpress.com and you can follow him on twitter as @sandygautam.Related posts:
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey Sandeep…That’s a nice idea for a web startup. I guess the only Indian version which might come a bit close to this domain is mouthshut.com
Agree with Pooja. Other option could be something like burrp.com or asklaila.com.
Its understood the above are not a direct match for yelp, but desi mini-me versions which could to a starting point. I might be wrong but I think many Indians tend to consume to info but contribute less compared to some other (developed?) countries. By contribute I mean blogging, rating, reviewing, social bookmarking content, add videos to youtube (not just our children’s dance performance) etc.
I think another idea for Google could be to data mine what comments, status updates are on some of its other properties like Orkut and Blogger, and use that to link content or reviews onto its locational services.
Excellent suggestions Madhav! and very insightful as far as contributions of Indians are concerned; we usually do not contribute as actively as we consume.