Perspectives

This is one long pending post. Zook is a new sms and/or wap based local search service that a good friend of mine and others released a month back or so. Sameer calls it “Mobile answer engine”. Pretty funky huh?
There are quite a few reviews about zook all over the web now, and Zook’s blog is here. But why keep reading when you can actually try it ? Point your mobile browser to http://zook.in or send in a query like “Zook ringtone” to 3030 in bangalore. (not sure if it works in other citites).

The USP of this product, ofcourse is the way it helps you narrow down on what you are looking for by way of asking a few unintrusive questions. Pretty neat, I should say. My point of contention there is that, zook kinda assumes that most queries have multi meanings. For instance, Zook excels if your query is leading, like “thai”. But, most users come from a Google background where they help the search engine find what they want rather than confuse it. If I am really looking for a restaurant, I would explicitly say “thai restaurant, koramangala, bangalore”. And for a query like that, Google or any other local search works just as well or sometimes better than Zook.

But, zook could work like a charm for the long tail of (confusing) queries. I guess that is the intent , but I dont think they have that rich data yet. For instance, I know of a very famous coffee shop recommended by “Lonely planet” in colaba, mumbai. Google does a decent job. Zook returns nothing.

I use the wap zook along with seraja for events, which is pretty good. Also, I dont think value added SMS is a viable option given the current state of things. Maybe, more on that later. On the whole, it is a very good start and Sameer is a think tank. Full of ideas all the time. I am sure they will crack it as we go along. He just gave a podcast on podtech with kamla Bhatt. He gives a few interesting data points there. Listen to it here. Or I have also embeded it in this blog post.