4 ms·
Ask YC: Can this work?
How can someone go about building a local search service in a country like Nigeria where most information can not be found online? The local search service would be accessed via sms messages.
I was thinking along the line of social search/crowdsourcing, i.e. when a request is made to the service via sms, that same sms is sent to the whole community and the responses is ranked and the highest ranked response from the community is sent to the requester via sms.
My question is, can this work? is it scalable? I know this is something that is useless without a community but becomes more useful exponentially as the community grows.
- stonemetal 17y agoRanked by who? As the community grows this ranking body is going to become more burdened. If the community is doing the ranking as well as the answering you are talking about X sms messages per question where X is the size of the community that responds to the message. I really can't see someone going along with answering some question then dealing with voting on 200 responses for very long. It could work but I don't see it working as posed. You probably need some way to limit the scale and have some sort of incentive.
- aitoehigie 17y agoIt would be ranked by the system, all responses from the commnuity are collated and ranked using an algorithm and the highest ranked is sent to the requester.
- something 17y agothis may be a dumb question, but what kind of information is this? "local search" feels commerce- or service-centric.
- aitoehigie 17y ago"Information" here refers to any kind of information and when i say "local" i mean information relative to the country i.e. Nigeria. Nigeria as a country has very little information on the web, so i would say this service can be likened to Google local search but with a wider perspective.