12 June 2008

Mumbai: A little too far to travel for lunch

At bigmouthmedia we enjoy a good feed every now and then, especially when we've a lot to talk about - which is most of the time. We also love to use search engines to find the location of recommended restaurants and Google Local is great for this. Since Universal Search came into play, finding a restaurant and booking a table in a certain location can be done with as little as a single click!

When my mind turned to dinner yesterday, I suggested an Indian restaurant specializing in traditional Mumbai dishes - kamag kakri is awesome - to my fellow bigmouths. Searching Google for "Mumbai restaurants" presented me with the usual local listings one-box, universal fashion at the top of the search results:

Mumbai: A little too far to travel for lunch

I was about to call and book a table when noticed the odd telephone numbers - and subsequently the unexpected location - and the review links leading directly to Google Local India.

When internet users search for a geographical term next to a business category, search engines usually think "You are looking for a business in location". This kind of logic provides relevant results in a high percentage of queries, but not this time! Advanced search engines like Google usually look into many other conditions that help them interpret the searcher's intentions and get closer to the desired results. Personal search history, click-through patterns, information from other services, etc. are gaining an increasing role in the refinement of search results. In this case, "pages from the UK" would normally be one of the factors considered.

Google is pushing hard for a share of the the huge potential contained in the Indian internet market, which only rivals that of China. In the past months, we have seen Google offering Indian transliteration in 5 languages, the release of Google News in Hindi and lastly Google Local India, which was released in March 2008. Bringing Indian local listings into Google global search properties offers additional promotion that can help boost the popularity of this service and the size of their database.

So while the restaurants suggested by Google yesterday certainly looked tempting, they were just a little out of reach for us Edinburgh bigmouths.