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Pahwa KBS Backs India-Focused Human Powered Search Engine Antya.com
Fri, 12/07/2007 - 16:05 — Sahad P V
Delhi based Pahwa KBS has made an undisclosed amount of seed investment in an India-focussed human powered search engine Antya.com. The search engine is being launched today. Pahwa KBS is the company behind Desimartini, a social networking website which was recently sold to FireFly E-ventures Ltd, the internet arm of HT Media Ltd.
Antya is the first external investment of Pahwa KBS, a part of Delhi-based Pahwa Group which makes dehumidifiers and plastic dryers in the brand name of Bry-Air. They do not have a dedicated corpus for seed investments, but will look at seed funding innovative start-up internet companies, Vivek Pahwa, the CEO of Pahwa KBS told VC Circle.
According to press release, Antya is a simplified search engine aimed at non-internet savvy or advanced users looking for quick, reliable information on the web. To a question if Antya is along the lines of Mahalo.com (the human-powered search engine started by Jason Calacanis), Pahwa said: "Antya is not quite along the lines of Mahalo. Mahalo pre-programmes search results for queries. Antya use humans for building the search index."
Antya focuses on 'discovery', and shows results in a graphical format that has better brand recall, and focuses on variety to users, the release added. "In India, people are not comfortable with typing, they would rather click on the web to get what they want," says Sunny Saurabh, co-Founder of Antya.com. (Read a review of the site on WebYantra)
Comments
Well Vivek... Its not about encouraging people into experimenting. It's about obvious pros and cons of the project. If you are saying people will trust the human edited search results versus what the big daddys are offering in a corrupt country like India where big companies do anything to market their product, hats off to your judgemental power. Another good example is Desi martini, which even has the images directly stolen from Facebook. It was an amazing find that even the colors used on Desi martini were the same rgb values as Facebook!! Well... that's why they say "great men think alike". I wonder why are strange things happening to you?!
While I hate discouraging people from experimenting (all entrepreneurs began with something that others initally found preposterous), sometimes a reality check can really be benificial. So, in that spririt, I should say that Indians not wanting to type is just a load of cr*p. C'mon what's the guy smoking? It's just a completely absurd statement which forces someone to doubt even other value propositions of the site and hurts their credibility. Pls stop making such inane statements if u want to be taken seriously.
I checked out Antya and searched for some common terms like "India" or "Delhi" and the results were a load of crap. Come on - get serious - a human powered search engine. This sounds absurd. I am surprised that Indian VCs are putting their money into such crappy ventures.
Good to see entrepreneurs investing in startups..
Here is detailed review that I came across: http://www.pluggd.in/2007/12/antya-human-powered-search-engine-indias-ma...
Hey Vivek, that statement came from my experience at Google, while I was hired to be a part of the setup team in Delhi & Mumbai AdWords sales operations (I was more on the product rather than sales)... was trained on how Google works in the US, but had to unlearn everything... as people hardly typed any 3-word queries, most queries were basic or broad (with the exception of techonology queries n a few other verticals) or wid spelling mistakes... in fact SEM companies were targeting these spelling mistakes... to get cheap clicks... don't get me wrong... I'm not saying that spelling mistakes don't happen in any other country, it is just that they were quite prevalent, and not the usual keyboard ones, e.g. maruthi for maruti.
The experience has been the same on Antya... the unique queries have been falling, at present it is about 30 per cent. Anyways, it seems like you've a lot of experience on search in India, do share your thoughts on sunny at antya.com.
Igno, the human aspect of the search ends with the discovery of sites (which are now suggested by users). We don't crawl. We are more of a web directory (like our FAQs mention)... absolutely no competition to the big daddys... infact we complement them... our home page mentions this very clearly... it is about "Find or Discover" websites... and we have a search interface to enable users to do so.