New Analysis

Your city on the Net

Onyomo wants to be the Indian alternative to Google. Aishwarya Ramani takes a look at the company’s strategy against the backdrop of the search engine business in India.

India’s always been a country of migrants who either move to the big cities to find gainful employment or those who shift cities on transfer. Whatever the reason, the most frustrating aspect of a change in place is finding places to shop, and hang-out, getting around town and generally knowing the area where you choose to settle down. It is in times like these that one feels the need for a search engine that will offer the kind of local search that Google and Yahoo! offer in the US.

Especially for the new-age technically-savvy crowd addicted to convenience and automation, yellow pages with an inbuilt search function seemed to be an appropriate alternative. Thus was born a portal called Onyomo that can guide you on the nearest coffee shop, beauty salon, grocery store, in short just about anything in your vicinity.

Conceived by Sailesh Mehta, the CEO, the portal was a result of the trouble he had to undergo while settling down in Delhi after returning to India a couple of years ago. Mehta wanted others to avoid a similar situation and he found a solution for them in Onyomo.

Mehta, born and brought up in Kota, Rajasthan, completed his B Tech from IIT Bombay and went on to do his MBA from INSEAD France. Prior to doing the MBA, he worked with TCS and other companies abroad. After spending four years out of the country he decided to return to India and settle in New Delhi. That was when he had difficulty in finding his way around in the capital. But while in France, Mehta had come across Web sites that provided localised search with the help of interactive maps. Mehta decided to model Onyomo on these lines.

The portal acts as an interactive set of yellow pages. If you foresee a free weekend and want to make plans of meeting friends but don’t know the most happening hang-out in your part of town, Onyomo steps in to help you. As of now, it covers only Delhi and Bangalore.

This online guide is presently in beta but user-friendly. For instance, if you type the phrase ‘Tata Safari,’ the site generates a list of all Safari dealers in the city of Delhi or Bangalore. As an added feature, it also gives you a map that lets you locate the dealer. Searching for restaurants will give you the contact number, the address, a map and an estimated average amount that you’d expect to spend there. Missing however are reviews of restaurants and hotels.

The importance of search

Though it may sound like another start-up search engine or portal that has big plans but no backing or large following, it is a fact that localised Internet search is a powerful tool in today’s world and concepts like Onyomo will find many takers in the future.

India’s growing use of the Internet is a-given. One doesn’t need advanced calculus to get a perspective on the heights that the Internet can scale in India. However, according to K P Balraj, Managing Director, Sequoia Capital, the base of Indian Netizens is only about 30 to 40 million. Sequoia Capital is a venture capital firm based in California that helped fund Yahoo! and Google when they were nascent businesses.

Balraj felt that Google was the market leader in India but one could not discount the fact that if a search engine offered localised search it would pique the interest of the displaced Indian urbanite. “It is certainly difficult to compete with Google at this stage because of their experience and state-of-the-art technology. What would make an impact is a more localised search,” opined Balraj.

That’s good news for Onyomo and it could be the same for Google or Yahoo! India if they got around to doing the same. Yahoo! already offers city-specific portals but it doesn’t drill down to the nitty-gritty and caters more to the foreign tourist visiting India rather than Indians from other cities or states.

Krishna Prasad, Head of Programming, Microsoft said, “Search revenues are almost doubling year-on-year and it is one of the fastest-growing service, with extension into vertical searches it is only set to grow. We have almost grown 20 times beginning last year.”

Officials at Yahoo! echo this opinion. George Zacharias, Managing Director, Yahoo! India added, “The search market is showing a healthy growth with search usage in India growing at a rate of over 100 percent year-on-year.”

However, some hurdles remain. Balraj explained, “The Internet in India caters only to the English-speaking population, the reason why the user base is small. But, eventually I do feel it will diversify into Hindi, Tamil and other languages. This certainly will help broaden the user base.” When asked what most Indians are looking for on the Internet, he said, “Majority of the searches in India pertain to cricket and entertainment, but this is slowly changing.”

Michael Mortiz, Partner, Sequoia Capital is of the opinion that the Internet in India has not grown as fast as people expected it to. However, if the views of Microsoft and Yahoo! are to be considered, the search engine business isn’t doing too badly for itself in spite of the Internet “not growing as fast as expected.”

Google Trends statistics on searches show that the phrase ‘coffee shop’ and India ranked eighth in 2006. What this means is that the number of searches from PCs located in India for the phrase ‘coffee shop’ are sufficient to rank India among the top 10 countries searching for this information. Similarly, India is in the top five when it comes to searches for ‘movie theatre’ or ‘multiplex.’

Google Trends is approximated and normalised but it does show that Indians don’t stop with using the Net to check e-mail.

Big ambitions

Currently a self-funded venture, Mehta believes that Onyomo does not have any dearth of funds. “We have been approached by some leading venture capitalists (VCs) operating in the international market, as also some local VCs and angel investors.” Their aim is to grow into a $100 million business in India. They are also looking at advertising as means of raising revenues.

Currently operating out of IIT Delhi, Mehta said, “IIT has provided us the basic infrastructure at competitive rates.” They have a separate Onyomo server, configured solely for the purpose of Onyomo’s search engine. Mehta claimed that his site was generating 5,000 hits per day. When quizzed about the backup systems, he said, “Our current systems run fault-tolerant software designed in-house to ensure near-zero downtime.”

In the future, the company plans to cover Mumbai, Pune and Chennai. “Mumbai can potentially be huge for us. Bangalore was a test-run and if we are able to perform well in a smaller market, we will be better equipped to face a market as large as Mumbai,” felt Mehta.

It would be quite interesting to see how Onyomo performs. The site needs to move out of beta, right now response times are longish, there’s a perceptible lag before you get your search results.

If Onyomo succeeds in getting Indians onto the concept of locality-based searches, you will find the biggies jumping onto the bandwagon. While that may result in the company facing intense competition and maybe even selling out to one of the larger firms, it will be good news for the rootless Indian.