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<\/a><\/p>\nIt was well past 6:00 pm on a Friday, and the engineers were hard at work in front of computer terminals running command line scripts. \u00a0We were warmly greeted by Ask Laila’s CTO, Birla and his team, and seated in a corner conference room.<\/p>\n
He began by explaining that Ask Laila was a tool for individuals to find local resources, such as hardware stores, plumbers, and restaurants, from their mobile phone on the go. \u00a0The service, he explained, is also popularly accessed from the web, as 60% of web search traffic is looking for local results. \u00a0Ask Laila can also be used as a tool for business owners, who can claim their listing, keep it up to date, and populate it with information that may ingratiate it in the eyes of potential customers browsing lists of results. \u00a0In these ways, Birla explained, the model is comparable to Yelp in the U.S.<\/p>\n
However, as we learned from Indus, Birla reiterates that creating something like Ask Laila in India isn’t as simple as porting over the Yelp model. \u00a0For example, in the United States, one can purchase a vast index of businesses, addresses, and phone numbers akin to a digital yellow pages to incorporate into a local search engine. \u00a0In India, this did not exist until Ask Laila painstakingly located, called, and catalogued the businesses into their own proprietary database. \u00a0Furthermore, while there is a large group of users searching on their mobiles, as well as searching on the web, it’s more difficult to reach out to business owners to populate their profiles and keep them current. \u00a0Such shopkeepers and business owners are not generally web savvy, and especially outside urban areas do not have immediate access to a computer.<\/p>\n
The technology must also accommodate users whose first language is almost certainly not English, which creates non-standard spellings of words as search inputs. \u00a0For example, the name Nandani, a girl’s name in India, may be spelled in a variety of ways illustrated below.<\/p>\n