

Ask YC: Can this work? - aitoehigie

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.
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stonemetal
Ranked 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.

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aitoehigie
It 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.

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something
this may be a dumb question, but what kind of information is this? "local
search" feels commerce- or service-centric.

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aitoehigie
"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.

