Zook.in goes International

Zook.in, India’s most popular Mobile Answer service, launched world-wide

Bangalore based Ziva Software has announced the world-wide launch of its popular mobile answer service and flagship product Zook.in. Users across the globe can use Zook.in to find exact answers (and not just links to web pages) that can be consumed directly – especially for local queries (hotels, shops, places of interest, etc.) and media queries (music, video, images, etc.). Users can try local queries such as "harvard medical school boston" (US), "thai orchid oxford" (England), "kinokuniya singapore" (Singapore), "boulders resort hampi" (India), "tryp hotel brasilia" (Brazil). Or media queries such as “jai ho pussycat dolls” (Hindi), “party in the usa mp3” (English), “santana oye como va” (Spanish), etc.

Zook.in is based on a unique paradigm for mobile search by ensuring that the users are provided with exactly what they want – relevant answers that can be consumed immediately. Zook.in can be accessed on any mobile phone with a browser and internet access: users only need to open their favourite browser and go to www.zook.in to experience this innovative service.

Zook.in uses the Web to answer user queries directly. To ensure that every user query is provided with the best possible answers, Zook.in not only fetches results from its own index but also from Yahoo!, Microsoft, Youtube, etc. Zook.in analyzes the results (web-pages) returned by these services, extracts relevant and useful information from the web-pages, and includes them in the results provided to the users. Consequently, users are guaranteed that they will get better results than those provided by the previous generation of web search engines.

Announcing the world-wide launch of Zook.in, Dr. Ajay Sethi, CEO, Ziva Software, said “We strongly believe that mobile users should not need to scavenge through several web-pages looking for answers. Mobile users typically want results that can be consumed immediately – for example, address and phone-numbers, direct link to relevant mp3 file, etc. Instead of merely tweaking PC-based search services, mobile users need a service that directly caters to these requirements.”

Zook.in’s goal is to provide 1-Click answers for each and every user query. To satisfy this goal, Zook.in has built an innovative self-learning search platform with several cutting-edge technologies: Zook.in uses a focused crawler to spider the web; it uses an innovative technique to identify the ‘useful’ parts of a page; it uses a highly scalable data pipeline to process the raw extracted data and to cleanse and enrich the data; it constructs more complete answers by merging results from several web-pages; it uses a federated search system to pull relevant results across multiple data sources and services; it derives and uses user’s country and city to return suitable results; etc.

Zook.in’s self-learning system automatically learns user requirements and dynamically modifies the answer extraction and result ordering based on user queries and community-wide usage. Zook.in currently provides direct answers for local and media queries; with usage, Zook.in will get trained to provide relevant answers directly for other categories as well.

“The most useful and the most common search queries on mobile phones are related to local search and media search. That’s exactly what Zook.in provides to its international users. Zook.in provides address and phone-numbers for local search query anywhere in the world – even in the remote corners of the world. Likewise, Zook.in provides actionable results for media queries. Users are provided with direct links to mp3 music files, videos, images, etc. In fact, since Zook.in is built on top of existing web search services, users are guaranteed that they will get better results than those provided by the previous generation web search engines.” added Dr. Ajay Sethi.

About Ziva Software:
Ziva Software is a mobile search startup that has built an innovative Mobile Answer Engine that uses the Web to answer user queries directly. Zook.in provides direct answers (and not links to web pages) that can be consumed directly – especially for the local (hotels, shops, places of interest, etc.) and media (music, video, images, etc.) queries. Ziva Software has developed a unique self-learning answering engine that constantly learns and provides better answers to users across the whole world.

Ziva Software was incubated at IIM Bangalore. Ziva Software has partnerships in India with several mobile operators – such as Aircel, Airtel, Idea Cellular, Spice, Tata, Virgin Mobile, etc.

Ziva Software received Series A funding ($1.7 million) from Ojas Venture Partners in 2006.