Antya is another startup which was showcased at Proto.in 2008 and is a human powered search engine. Well, recently we had covered Wikia & Faroo and both of them also depend on the users for providing search results.
Antya has been funded by Vivek Pahwa who managed to sell the copy of FaceBook called DesiMartini to HT media (well, I have to give 10/10 to Vivek for his marketing skills or 0/10 to HT media people in market research else this deal wouldn’t have been possible). Anyway, Antya is a little complex search engine and the concept is still not very clear to me. It’s a combination of search engine, discovery engine (like Stumbleupon) & a regularly updated directory.
Antya works a little different from search engines as it doesn’t show the results like any other search engine (who mostly show results like Google does) but it focuses on the brand of the websites. It’ll show you the related images and brand building images (logos, posters etc.) of the search results and they do it because that’s what there mission is : “To make all brands & businesses discoverable to the end user”
But does it really solve the problem ? Well, I can’t say much about it because I’ll definitely get in touch with the founders to know more about Antya and how it’ll benefit anyone (I hope after reading this review, they’ll even talk to me) but meanwhile a small search still shows me that I’ll still prefer Google over Antya and here’s the example :
I tried searching for Pizza Hut Chennai on Antya and it gave me the website of Pizza Hut. However the same search on Google gave me lot of results which were of more interest to me and here are the reasons which still keep me with Google (even if we leave Google, Guruji (another local search in India) gave me better results:
1. I got the phone number of Pizza Hut (Adyar), without going on their website.
2. I got the results of various other websites like Chennai Best which tells me that what else is good in Chennai and thus gives me the option of trying few other things.
3. I got results related to Chennai, however Antya gave me results related to food (which definitely makes sense) but what’s the point if it gives me the result of a restaurant in Hydrabad or Delhi ?
4. Also if I want to know the reviews of Pizza Hut adyar, I probably can’t because it will only show me the website and it doesn’t indexes other webpages.
However, if you ask me that when I’ll use it then I’ll rather tweak my search to Pizza Chennai and that gives me all the brands which shows some of the brands associated with Pizza and Chennai.
Now that was something to do with Search and search results, I still don’t see any business model out of Antya (I’m not the best business person) however, I wonder why any VC will be interested in funding them if they are depending on Google Ads themselves.
So I’m still wondering if Antya should be considered as a search engine or should it be considered as a discovery engine. Well, I’ll definitely keep an eye on Antya and will love to see how it will evolve in future.
Here’s the presentation which they gave at Proto.in 2008 in front of all the VCs and entrepreneur’s :
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Hey dude… i saw ur review… first of all…. u r not enough to rank such a big players in India… Do u think HT purchased the site without seeing any income from DesiMartini.. ?
Secondly, we cannot compare the antya.com with the mother of search engine (google.com)… as u said there mission is : “To make all brands & businesses discoverable to the end userâ€?
Then there is no way in ranking or review the places
As u have searched for pizza hut chennai in google.com which resulted you list of pizza hut outlets in chennai….. have u noticed that all the results got the same url…. that is the idealogy of that people..
There are here to brands discoverable…. understand the words properly and give the feedback…..
But onething i can understand is u r a good critisizer than a review maker.
Anyway dude make a good reivews…… bye!!! Thank u
Hey Satya, thanks for the comments. I’m glad that you came with some great points where we can discuss further about Desimartini, ht media and antya itself.
1) Hey dude… i saw ur review… first of all…. u r not enough to rank such a big players in India :
Well, completely agreed but I just gave my point of view and nothing else. HT media bought it seeing the money coming in or did they buy it because they see a business opportunity out of it.
Do you see any progress made in Desimartini after HT Media bought it ? I don’t think anything has been done till this time and if DesiMaritini is making few dollars out of it (considering Vivek boasted about the userbase), they can much more out of it on that userbase itself.
However, nothing of that sort can be seen. Maybe you can enlighten us more on that.
2) we cannot compare the antya.com with the mother of search engine (google.com)… as u said there mission is : “To make all brands & businesses discoverable to the end user�
Well, antya came up as local search engine with a mission (which I took from their website…in never said it myself) so I just compared it with Google’s local search. And I think you missed out the line where I mentioned about Guruji (again a local search engine from India).
3) As u have searched for pizza hut chennai in google.com which resulted you list of pizza hut outlets in chennai….. have u noticed that all the results got the same url…. that is the idealogy of that people..
That was just the local part of the search result, I never displayed the whole search page, but I’ve included the link so if you search for same terms you’ll get various search results which will have various URLs. Plus I mentioned that it gives me the phone number to reach to the Pizza hut’s and that sounds more fruitful rather than going on that site.
4) But onething i can understand is u r a good critisizer than a review maker.
Thank you for appreciating me. If at all my criticism can be of any help to the developers, then I’ll consider my post as successful.
Although, I did mention that where I would love to use Antya, I guess you missed that part too.
hi rajat
being a local search player Google is the flight you take to go long distances( large search) and we are the local transport between t.nagar – adyar. The big search stumbles at local levels as its lens is not finegrained enough