More on DWAAR…
June 12, 07 by BharaniDWAAR.com is available for public view now, but under “Labs”.
I am handling the “cities” vertical and to an extent “Restaurants” vertical also. Both of these verticals have similar requirement as far as product features and data are concerned. Both of these verticals face common problems too! There are two key aspects of this product that should come out very strongly, but doesn’t: The Search quality (Ability to pull up relevant results intelligently based upon query keywords. The efficiency lies in avoiding both false positives and false negatives!) and the Data Quality.
Though the Search quality is at manageable levels and can be solved in the short-term at technology level, the Data quality still remains an unsolved mystery. Following are some of the major problems that we face with the Data:
1. In-accurate Data. Wrong phone numbers, wrong addresses, wrong names etc.,
2. Mis-classification of Data. Business records being classified in to wrong categories.
3. Lack of Depth: The records does not have enriched information. example: What products are services the businesses offer? What are the special features? etc.,
4. Lack of coverage: There aren’t sufficient records for some categories and cities.
5. In-complete Data. The necessary fields are found missing.
6. Duplication of Data.
Our immediate goal is to rectify the above problems and we are doing it earnestly through various approaches.
The problems that are mentioned above are industry-wide, especially in India. That doesn’t justify the problems that we have in the product, but atleast it gives us a chance to be a differentiated product in this space (with high focus of data quality).
I am so desperate to increase the high-quality data corpus for “local” that I am digitizing the visiting cards of mine and my friends during my free time. Now-a-days, when I go shopping, I don’t forget to collect the visiting card. The businesses/vendors/service providers that I come across will definitely be available in DWAAR in few weeks time 
Once this data gets in to Production, I don’t even have to worry about missed visiting cards. I just go to DWAAR and search for the information :)…I definitely take care not to digitize personal visiting cards (of working professionals)! If any of you would like to add good businesses/vendors to the database, please ping me (@ bharani at gmail.com)…I will be very grateful to talk with you and for your help.
I envision that “DWAAR” would be the place to go for finding any business and associated contact details for Indians.
Karthik Says: 11.06.07 at 3:43 pm
Why can’t dwaar be like a wiki collecting information such as these from the users themselves? I think that will be more exhaustive without making data collection tedious for you guys and also be accurate.
educatedunemployed Says: 11.06.07 at 8:54 pm
Hats off to the effort.
Jeeva Says: 12.06.07 at 10:48 am
What is the process for adding details to dwaar? Who all can add data? and are you setting any lifetime for the digitized offline data?
Bharani Says: 13.06.07 at 6:16 am
Karthik, The wiki approach will be available soon. The facility should have been built in the product long ago. But couldn’t happen due to different priorities. I completely agree that doing it ourselves is not scalable and sustainable. But what we are doing is to put in-place a good initial seed…
Thanks EU.
Jeeva, As of now the process of adding details to dwaar is internally managed. There is no external interface for users to upload directly. The platform to add details to DWAAR is panning out. That platform will be pretty comprehensive and will take care of points like lifetime that you suggested.
Please bombard me with as many questions as possible…Interesting to see the thoughts.
Indian Blogger Says: 13.06.07 at 3:57 pm
Nice effort. Isn’t there any government information available for this to validate data. I guess, probably there is not.One of the toughest challenges for the Indian Internet Market.!
Just curious..Did you guyz do some Market Research to get the details.I did some testing at Dwaar now.I searched for “Chinese” restaurant in “Bangalore” and I got awesome results. I then changed Bangalore to “Bengaluru” (the new name),the results were not fetched.
Hey,you might want to check out this site created by one of my classmates- http://themenusite.ca/ .
This is highly customized for the local market ( Kingston). They have scanned menu cards and even depending on the current time suggest if the restaurant is open or not. Folks can even provide reviews.
satheesh Says: 30.06.07 at 7:54 am
hi,
I am Satheesh, Shankar Prakash’s friend. The site looks good. I am just putting some thoughts (may be you would have already thought about it)
1. Include maps (like yahoo maps or 3D maps)
2. Now, the iphone trend is going, people like the iphone UI it seems, so change the UI with ICONS.
3. Use AJAX technology more, so that page refresh can be avoided
4. May be you can link the individual websites (like while showing college info, include the website info)
By the way, what is your revenue model, how do you get money from this..
WISH YOU ALL THE BEST..
Best Regards,
Satheesh
Jeeva Says: 19.07.07 at 3:18 pm
interested in stats..
can you publish a chart showing
number of blog postings(monthly average)
b4 MBA,
during MBA,
after MBA b4 marriage,
and after marriage?
raghini Says: 09.08.07 at 10:45 am
I think user reviews would be a good option to add… I was searching for some restaurants in mumbai and didn’t know which one to choose from the list that got displayed.
Hope u are doing good
Ragu Says: 21.08.07 at 7:28 pm
hi Bharani, have been reading your blog for long…dwaar.com is a good effort. You might want to check out competition from Google in the near future…the article in Livemint on “Google now takes aim at tapping local search”. Google is trying to build a very large local database and planning to integrate it ultimately with Google Maps (although this is not anytime soon).