Building the world’s largest repository of LOCAL Q,A&S (Questions, Answers and Services)

I thought the best way to start this story is to have you search for

• an affordable tea ceremony not far from where you are, bonus if the venue also happens to rent kimonos
• pools that are open for lane swimming but not too heated in your city or a locality you are currently visiting
• recommendations for skilled nearby jewelers to help you resize your engagement ring

Not knowing where to start, most people will likely resort to Google in the hope of quickly finding relevant answers, only to be met with frustration and time wasted trying different combinations of keywords and other tricks.

That’s hardly a surprise if you know how Google search works. Google engines, in fact don’t collect information but rather strive to organize (index) what is available on the Internet. Back to our examples above, for Google to return anything meaningful, someone should have had a very similar question or experience and wrote about it in a blog or somehow left a digital footprint during his or her search that Google was able to track.

Granted, Google improved search by orders of magnitude but the knowledge tail is getting longer and thicker by the day and Google tools so far are only good to solve for the head of the knowledge distribution.

Ok we got it! How are you going to answer the questions above then?

Well, humans are a highly capable bunch, we saw that in wikipedia through its openly editable content model where people teamed up and wrote the largest free encyclopedia. Surely the same people, given the right platform, tools and incentives can ask and answers billions of questions this time with an embedded structure and metadata that will make tail search much easier and less frustrating of an experience

Few questions worth asking at this point:

Collecting local information, sure but how to incentivize people to help?

Seeding the platform and reaching a critical mass will certainly be hard but once people start seeing value and getting answers to their highly specific questions, they will feel indebted (in a good way) and will in turn help answer other specific questions especially if they ran into similar situations; and guess what, chances are many did since they had to find answers in order to carry on with their lives.

Anything to learn from incumbent search engines (mostly Google) that can be applied to improve tail search?

I believe the below dimensions are key to a structured collection and relevant search, let’s see how Google implemented them and how they can be useful to solve for a tail search

Once this content collected, can it be indexed by Google?

It can but Google current tools won’t be able to keep the relevancy up to date. Again, this is a community effort: moderators and experts will help keep the content clean, other locals will constantly rate and vote for quality content, it’s a highly distributed mission and it’s very difficult if not impossible for an algorithm to be able to model such an effort.

Now enough with questions and assumptions, the best way to validate ideas is to build and ship a product. I named the MVP implementing all the ideas above Local (I know I’m lazy so if you can think of another name, please shout). Local is still in early Beta and was just approved by Apple. Here are some screenshots

Interesting but can you recap the main differences from Google Search, Quora or Facebook Groups and the shortcomings Local is trying to address?

Ok, let’s start with Quora:

• Not sure if you noticed but the sheer majority of specific (local) questions remain unanswered on Quora, which also started to feel more and more generic a la wikipedia.
• Many questions are answered by people blatantly self promoting themselves, businesses they run or companies they work for. Quora has lax self promotion stance and it’s been impacting the credibility of Quora’s answers for a while now.
• Quora’s business model, like most online services, is based on advertising; a model that will likely suffer from the curse of information superfluidity in the long run i.e. in order to satisfy advertisers, services tend to relentlessly accumulate content sacrificing quality in the process so to keep users coming to consume an ever increasing content and ads.

Above are some of the shortcomings I noticed through years of usage; I still like Quora and the product is clearly a net contributor to humanity gross knowledge product but I candidly think that it’s far from being a useful tool when it comes to answering specific and localized questions.

As mentioned above, Google mission is to organize the world’s information... So by design, it’s not collecting and crowd-curating answers to queries which means Google search would miss out on anything that is not already available on the internet that is the very long and thick tail.

Google is certainly aware of such gap in search and they are increasingly trying to pull information rather than just organizing what exists.

You can see this in Google maps product which keeps adding more and more features and incentives in every update to motivate local guides to share knowledge. The problem is, that will only improve Google’s repository of places - perhaps to prepare for VR products but isn’t offering a serious and elegant solution to local Q&As.

Facebook recently changed its mission and is now focusing much more on building and nurturing communities.

• While there are many Facebook groups that cover every aspect of our lives, the knowledge remain highly fragmented and not well organized. It’s a real pain and time consuming to find the right group with engaged users who are capable of providing quality answers to specific local questions. Needless to say that it’s virtually impossible to add all relevant local groups whenever you visit a new country or city. The reason for such mess is simple: Facebook groups weren’t originally designed to collect and share knowledge so what Facebook is doing feels more like a hack to cater to their new mission.
• Facebook business model has been challenged recently and while facebook succeeded in its original mission to connect many people from across the world, its feed and services became addictive and optimized to rather grab every bit of our attention rather than provide real value when needed. Unless Facebook rethinks its current models and diversify away from the business of selling attention to advertisers, whichever product they will come up with or the existing ones they are trying to tweak are disguised solutions to real problems.

With that, I would love to hear your feedback and any suggestions for improvements. The app is being rolled out across cities (Tokyo for now) and available on the app store from the link below

One more thing: monetization

Few people asked so let me start by saying that the more I talk to users near and far, the more I realize that many are itching for a refuge to newer social platforms that are no evil, that don’t optimize everything so that they can sell more ads, that don’t tweak and design their feeds to be addictive etc.

Here, I’d like to build a useful platform that is not supported by ads. Local Q&A cards are presented in a sensible chronological order or sorted using other well defined algorithms.

What we will be doing instead is to offer the possibility for locals as well as visitors to hire freelancers vetted by other users, all within the app. These freelancers will be recommended by the app based on user inquiries or can in turn send proposals directly to users if they have what it takes to help. We will then take a small fee for every gig. That way, our interests are well aligned with our users: we get paid only if we help others get a task done or problem solved!