Few months back we started the keep alive process with laila’s data. Results? SFSG (So Far So Good).
Well the journey started few days back, when all of us realized that its important for us to keep laila’s data updated. There are so many new shops/merchants opening up on a weekly basis, some shut down or an address changes. We started with setting up a team and collecting information from various media. We also benchmarked the data quality to the previous data updated. After changing few process we noticed that the data quality has gone higher then the previous benchmark. This gave us enough confidence that we can build this team and they will do a great job. Now the results part, laila has been new data on a weekly basis and this process has been running since couple of months.
On an average we update more then 2k data on a weekly basis. This is a huge number to be updated on a weekly basis and will be a continuous process. I will post some new listing on Laila.
Stay tuned!!!!
When I heard that you guys are actually doing your own research and getting all this data done, I was awestruck.
This is of course reflected in the quality of the data which is returned in your search results. But this is really a scalable model for your team to keep updating data and adding new data considering that you are expanding to all the major cities ?
How about if we let users take the initiative and there is an appropriate rewarding mechanism. Just a passing thought – what do you think ?
We consider data as one of the most important link in solving the local search puzzle in indian context. You are as strong as your weakest link in building a solution and bad quality of data will lead to bad quality of search/user experience.
Coming to the scalability question, we use a whole lot of technology and process to ensure that the scalability becomes easier and easier. We do want to get the users also involved but people have a tendency to keep clean things clean and make dirty things dirtier. So just trying to start with a clean eco system.
Others surely must have solved this problem before. Can’t you get data from the yellow pages? How about letting the merchants themselves take responsibility for creating and maintaining information about their businesses? For this approach to work, I agree that the initial set of data has to be pristine which is turn becomes a key aspect of driving traffic to the site which then provides an incentive for business owners to get their listing up on the site. Its a virtuous cycle that must be initiated by the kind of hard work you are currently putting in. How does Yahoo! Local solve this problem in other countries?
What is the fun in solving problems which others have already solved 🙂
Anyway coming to the point, we did realize that the existing data sources have very low level of accuracy and besides that they get out of date within a short span of time. So either way you need a process to take care of cleaning the existing water in the pond and bringing in more and more.
Talking about community and merchant participation, they are essential for us in the longer run but in the current scenario you would hardly find any small merchants who have the knowledge and expertise to go to a self service portal and do that. I do agree that in the longer run this will be an important thing.
In other countries there are separate companies which do the job of data collection and the internet search companies just provide a neat interface over them.
from one start-up firm to other , HAIL!
so happy to see you guys work on building a superb local search services platform.
i read all the blogs here and i know how exactly it feels to be in a start-up firm.
have fun guys..
Vikas
Product Manager
mobile-worx
Vikas: Thanks a lot for your kind word. Please continue to use asklaila and provide us feedback.