India Broadband Forum

Rameshjeee

Airtel offers free search on mobile

Looking for that Thai restaurant or a school address in the city?
Try Asklaila.com on your Airtel mobile. India’s largest mobile operator Airtel on Wednesday announced a partnership with local search engine Asklaila.com. With this free service, about 21-mn Airtel subscribers in six cities will be able to search via mobile, DTH or internet (on Airtellive.com) across 400 different categories.

It’s a consumer service whereby Asklaila.com has mapped local business listings in six cities—Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Chennai and Bangalore. Airtel will be expanding the local search to 13 cities by 2008-end. It offers another service for subscribers. If you want to save those mobile call bills while dialling a pizza outlet or a shop, you can make them toll free. With a free call feature available on all paid local listings, the advertiser will pay for the local call.

The local search for most categories will also be available on Airtel DTH service. An interactive menu (developed by Infosys) shows the options for various categories on the TV screen which has an Airtel DTH service. For mobile phones, Airtel is offering the service through SMS or by USSD (unstructured supplementary service data) SMS service.
In an USSD SMS session there is no store-and-forward capability, but response times for USSD-services are quicker. A SMS to *321# from any mobile generates an interactive local search menu.

Incidentally, Airtel already has a partnership with Google for local search. They are in the process of mapping Indian cities and making our local search presence robust. To get customers hooked on, Airtel have already started a free interactive voice-based call centre.Google India has started toll free local search for Hyderabad whereby anyone can call and find information about a local restaurant, inquire about airline or railway schedule.

While Google is banking on its capability to replicate its successful local search model in the US, in India local companies with large local database like Asklaila might acquire strong capability.

The revenue model for local search, according to Airtel, will be twofold. One from listings—paid listings will be sprinkled with stardust on the screen. The other model is through each lead conversion—Airtel-Asklaila will charge the advertiser a fixed fee per lead generated through local search. Each call by a Airtel subscriber via Asklaila.com will be played to the advertiser with a three-second clip saying this lead is brought to you by Asklaila.com

The number of total web searches per month in India is estimated to be about 1 billion, and 20-30% of these are local in nature, i.e., 200-300 million searches per month. In comparison, local search as a percentage of web search is about 60% in the US, as per Comscore.