Mumbai — Yahoo! India, the leading Internet Company, on Tuesday unrolled its new local information service, Yahoo! India Local, available in (beta), making it the third country to offer the service after the U.S. and U.K., a company spokeswoman said on Tuesday.
This new offering, which is in a beta test phase, provides a compelling user experience with relevant local information that impacts users’ daily needs, was launched in four cities — Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai.
This is a new neighborhood based website which intends to have access to all relevant local information that the user may need in day-to-day life. Yahoo plans to introduce Local to other cities depending on feedback from the initial rollouts.
Yahoo! India Local offers a wealth of local information such as business listings, maps and directions, local events, and current movies. Users can get listings from a wide range of categories such as restaurants, pubs, shopping malls, hospitals, schools, tailors, banks, health and fitness, and 24 hour pharmacies.
Gopal Krishna, Head of Audience, Yahoo! India, said “Yahoo’s Local Beta exemplifies our strategy to be the leading starting point on the web by providing a relevant and compelling experience for local needs. With this product, we are trying to make the web more useful, engaging, interesting and localized to our users.”
This product was designed and developed by the Yahoo! India team in association with the Yahoo! India Research & Development team.
Users can write reviews, leave footprints and mark businesses on maps apart from some more features like the ‘Essentialist’ which helps the user get to the required information about local areas.
With “Essentialist,” Yahoo! India Local intends to offer practical solutions for common problems. For example, relocating to Karol Bagh in Delhi can get you an “Essentialist that will provide details of essential services such as nearest gas agency, cable TV provider, provision stores, pharmacies, packers and movers, etc. Or if you are getting married in Andheri West, Mumbai, the Essentialist will give you salons for men and women, apparel shops, jewelers, event management companies, catering services, party halls and hotels in that locality.”
“Conceived to create an active and vibrant community, Yahoo! India Local will enable its users to harness community knowledge. With user-friendly tools like reviews and footprints, people can now find, use, share and enhance their local information at ease,” said Sridhar Ranganathan, Business Head, Local & Maps, and Yahoo! India.
The site also offers free inventory to local businesses so that they can put up their services on the web. The site also allows users to download or share information via SMS or email, apart form printer friendly listings in a format ‘that can be taped to a fridge’, according to Mr. Ranganathan.
Yahoo! in the past four months has been mounting aggressively. In February it introduced maps and directions; in April it introduced walking routes pan-India; and in May it introduced ‘Glue Pages Beta’ which takes search to the next level by collating and integrating the most relevant information from across the entire Web on to a single topical results page. In March the Yahoo! front page got a new look and feel.
“India is now becoming an important market for Internet companies, which are rolling out local versions of some of their main products and services.”
Also, in May, Google announced an Indian version of YouTube; while a month before MySpace launched an Indian version of its social networking site. Some Internet companies, including Yahoo, have sites and services such as e-mail and instant messaging in local Indian languages.