Perspectives

Yahoo! India has now introduced Local/Business search in India starting with a few cities (Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai and Delhi ). It is the usual, Find “what” in “where” local search destination except there are a few cheeky cool things.

Locality pages: for Koramangala, Indiranagar, Bandra West and Andheri West.

Essentialist: On the Koramangala Locality page, I found a couple of interesting questions such as “Are you getting married?” , “Moving to Koramangala?” being asked at me. And on click, it gives an essential list of all businesses you may ever need in the process of getting married (Assuming you already have a girl) or moving. Pretty cool.

Footprints: Assuming you have visited that business, then you could click on a “foot” looking icon and it will bump up a number. Something like digging a web page, I guess. I guess higher the footprint, more the listing will feature in your search, frontpage etc.

If you are business owner of if you know a business, you could add details of it using the “Add a Business”. I did’nt quite find a page/link to do that. But Y! Local did ask me about it when my search query did not yield a result. Such as this

There is a fair amount of Maps integration as well, but is not useful practically yet. You can do stuff like move around the marker of a business to it’s correct location, vote on it, save it etc.

You can also send the listing on SMS, email etc. I also like the UI and the layout, but I also wish the frontpage was a little light and plain. Right now, it has one too many links.

Cheers! to Yahoo! India.

Be it Wikimapia or keyhole or any one of those innumerable sites that have geographic information, the community has painstakingly marked those bus stops and milk booths and restaurants and even houses. Probably for personal satisfaction. Or maybe to help those lost and stranded. With a billion helpful minds behind, India suddenly seems too small. And now it is payback time.

Starting today, Yahoo! India Maps will cut across the web so that the best of location intelligence is available to you behind one text box at http://in.maps.yahoo.com. Try “Mumbai cst” or “metro, Delhi” or “garuda mall, Bangalore” and you will know what we are talking about. Looking for ATMs near Forum mall? Try “ATMs near forum mall, Bangalore”. Or maybe you are on that Motorbike drive across Chennai, “Shell petrol pumps in Chennai” will come in handy. These are locations that we have captured from various locations around the internet, wherever they exist.

And it does not stop with just that. Combine the mighty power of users with our unique Indian driving directions and suddenly, it seems like you may never be required to pull over and ask the pan-wallah for directions ever again. Yes, we know that many roads don’t have names and when they do, they probably don’t have sign boards indicating them. So, We thought landmarks and turns in your route instruction will help make it easier for you. Now, we have also added information about localities, towns, villages and cities along your route so that you know what you are leaving behind and what you are entering when you are on your journey.

Print it out or Send yourself an SMS and get going, because, getting lost is not so easy now.

- Says Yahoo! India Maps.

Was just trying to see where Opus Bangalore where, apparently, this gorgeous subject constantly performs. And found out that Google has integrated results from local.google.co.in. They have also managed to crawl reviews from Burrp. The data set itself hasnt improved much though.

Do you know that it is absolutely easy to create the firefox (and now IE7) sidebar search plugin?

First, read a bit about opensearch.
Next, head over to this page and this page at Mozilla developer center which explains the entire process beautifully. (What we discuss here is true only for FF2 and IE7. There is no search plugin concept in IE6 and for earlier versions of firefox, those two pages will tell you what to do.)

So, you essentially have to create an XML opensearch file. But, ofcourse you dont have a search engine for yourself. So, what to do ? Here is a template that you can use to create your plugin. Save it. And then, Read on.

A few things those pages wont tell you are these:

How do I get a icon like the one Yahoo or Google’s in the search bar? You probably have a favicon.ico for your site/blog. If you dont, Use an image creator. My favorite is GIMP. Create a small, 16×16 image with whatever you want inside it. For instance, mine has “S” which is the beginning alphabet in my name. Now, you probably have a jpeg or png image. Head over to the online favicon creator by html-kit. They give you a zip file. Unzip and you will have your favicon ready.

Next, You need to create a base64 version of your .ico file. Head over to this page. Replace the text on the textbox named type: with “image/x-icon”, check base64 and then upload the favicon that you just created and click generate. You get the base64 encoded string of your image file. Now, copy that string and paste it between the Image tags in the template file.

Third, make use of the fact that Google does all the hard work in indexing your pages. And that you can ask G to search just within your site by adding “site:yourdomain.com” to the search query.

There are two Url tags in that file. The first one is used for suggesting a query (auto suggestion). Did you realise that from FF2, when you start typing in the search bar, Google or Yahoo ( or most plugins) gives you an autosuggest ?

So, in these URL tags, replace yourdomain.com with your domain. And that is it. You are all set. Publish this XML and hopefully, if someone thinks your blog has a wealth of information, they may install it. For instance, here is a mine!