Comments on: Antya…human powered website discovery search engine

By: Nagu

Nagu — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 05:37:43 +0000

@Bharani
I agree.I also admire you guys for pioneering indian product .It takes a lot to dump relatively secure services industry and pursue innovation.

All the best.

@Amit .Thanks for profiling Indian start ups.Tech crunch is too US based and our start ups needed visibility.

By: Bharanidharan V

Bharanidharan V — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 21:11:28 +0000

Unmesh
Well, your example is giving a great deal of satisfaction to us. Antya is all about discovering relevant websites for the topic. The search for “Pune music” might return only one result and a relevant result now. But over the period of time, there search results will grow for each query, while not compromising the quality. Please refer to my answer below for your question on scale. Nice to hear abt the comment of “Review website” feature.

Debasish
Antya is not about information search. I am sure you wouldn’t want to read about “What Hindi is?” from wikipedia when you searched for “Hindi”. But instead, Antya is trying to disambiguate your intention by promption “Are you looking for? Hindi movies, Hindi actress, Hindi news etc., This prompts will evolve over the period of time through the learning from user community. Antya will get better and better over the period of time. We have just launched and are keenly listening to feedbacks like this. Just wanted to share an interesting statistic to you. For the first day, we have clocked around 1500 queries and around 100 websites have been suggested to us (through the “tell us what we are missing?”). These suggestions from user community is what we look forward to…and I would treat that as a success, however small it may be. Please let me know your other concerns at bharani at antya.com. Would love to act on it.

Shivaas
Yes, the task of discovering and extracting information about website is human-powered. It does require considerable human resources. A team of 25 can do wonders if they have the right guidelines, tools and systems in place. It’s all about fast turn-around. World is coming to us for cheap labour, so why not harness our own resources Having said all this, I will agree that scale and execution is the challenge for us and we have plans to tackle it.

@ Nagu: Well, We want to learn from the success of Naver. A concept can be a killer provided you have the right approach and execution. Antya is human-powered only to the extent of discovering websites and indexing it. Search results are completely dynamic taking into account ratings, relevancy et al. Mahalo takes the approach where the result pages are hard-coded. So, it is not fair to compare with Mahalo right-away.

And ofcourse, It’s too early to say if Mahalo is a failure.

@ Soumya: Soumya, the product was launched yesterday. So please go ahead and experiment. Would love your feedback. Please write to bharani at antya dot com.

By: Books News » Blog Archive » Antya…human powered website discovery search engine

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 12:54:22 +0000

[...] Antya…human powered website discovery search engineAntya (launching tomorrow) is a interesting twist to the ever burgeoning entourage of search engines dotting the internet. It works like a search engine (and looks like one as well) with a couple of differences – a) it is human powered …www.webyantra.net – http://www.webyantra.net [...]

By: pradeep

pradeep — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 10:03:04 +0000

I agree Amit
A single search string (Hindi) not returning the result doesn’t mean that the product is useless.
Even Google donot throw the correct results most of the times. Issues like this could be fixed within a stipulated time frame. Anyhow Antya is a good effort and let’s see how the founders take it forward.

By: amit

amit — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 09:49:03 +0000

Debashish,

I’m offended…do I look like the kind of person who is going to be impressed by the desimartini deal…(just joking)

I would think the idea is interesting…after all, there are dozen of search engines with slightly different flavours. each trying out some new twist…somebody can potentilly come up with a useful product or at least a useful innovation to the core search product as we know it today.

The search not showing meaningful results may just be a data population issue, which could get addressed with time…but that is not a reflection of its core value prop.

amit

By: Debashish

Debashish — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 09:07:56 +0000

Frankly I don’t think the site deserved a mention Amit (the Desimartini deal is all haughty talk, if that impressed you about them), its not even an alpha product right now. Try searching for “Hindi” and you will know what I mean.

By: Unmesh Mayekar

Unmesh Mayekar — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 07:36:27 +0000

I must say that this comment is a little biased because when I searched for “India Map”, our company (SadakMap) was listed first

I am curious as to how its implemented and if it is purely human indexed, then how do they plan to scale? My search for “Pune Music” showed just one site, but a Google Search shows much more. So is “quality search” their claim to fame?

Their review a website feature has the potential to take a life of its own. Not sure if there is such a thing out there.