The Hindu Business Line : Yahoo India plans new offerings on the Net

New Delhi March 25 Looking to bring some innovation in the product you are planning to launch? You could ask online some thousands of users as to the kind of features they expect in the product. And chances are you may get some interesting ideas that could make your product kick off.

Or, as consumer if you are looking for answers to any problem, you could log online to a social search platform and find answers from not only users but possibly from some companies as well which could bail you out. For instance, if you have a skin problem, you could benefit from the experience of thousands similarly afflicted in other parts of the world.

Consumer Feedback

Facilities of such kind are part of the plans that Yahoo India has for its social search products. "We would like to bring new forms of online advertisement for such social search products in contrast to pop-ups. For instance, in Brazil, Renault asked a question on `Yahoo Answers' as to the kind of features consumers would want in a car that the company was planning to launch.

With the response it received from users of this platform, it actually incorporated some of these features. Similarly, in US, Toyoto used this platform for a pre-launch consumer feedback," Mr Rishi Behal, Director, Search, Yahoo India.

In India, it has just started with Gillette, and Yahoo is looking at how more companies could use its platform," he added.

Yahoo Products

Yahoo, which launched its `Answers,' a community based solutions product, globally in December 2005 and in April 2006 in India, has already attracted 90 million users worldwide and 12 per cent of online users in India.

With users asking questions ranging from comics, entertainment to gardening, philosophy, it is a mix of most obvious ones and difficult ones, serious as well as funny and these get answered by people from across the globe.

With this product gaining currency, Yahoo India also plans to bring its other social search products such as Flickr, a photo sharing Web site, as well as Delicio.us book marking product on its India Web page.

"With social search as our key focus, we would launch other products such as Flickr and Delicio.us on the Indian Yahoo Network over the coming months," said Mr Behal.

While these are Yahoo products globally, it has not yet been able to offer products such as Flickr on its India network because of concerns related to censorship laws.

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