As part of its continued focus towards users in India, Google has launched a new social app named ‘Neighbourly’ to help bridge different communities under the same neighbourhood across cities in the country. What the app provides is a platform for your local queries like searching for the right mechanic, festivals around your place or good general doctor, etc. The app will then feed these questions to users in the same locality who will be able to answer with their up-to-date information and their own opinion about it.
Think of it like Quora, but a locally based one at that. Information will be sorted depending upon the helpfulness of a certain answer. Users will be able to ask a question based on their locality so the experts on that subject will direct you to the place or suggest the best thing to be done in that scenario. To make things more convenient, Google also allows you to dictate your question to the app or answer to a query through your voice, to give users a feel like they’re actually talking to their neighbours.
Users will also be able to share their expert opinions by swiping left or right to go through the questions that need to be answered. Google has made it interesting in a way that the more answers you share, the more you get recognized by Google as well as your neighbours. The search giant has made Neighbourly safe to use since no personal information like your contact number or even your full name is displayed when using the app.
Google Neighbourly is currently available on the Google Play Store as a Beta app that weighs in at just under 7MB. The service is already live in Mumbai but will soon roll out for other cities in the coming days. It’s to be noted that the Neighbourly app will divide the localities in your city into area names that match the local train perimeter like Santacruz West, Bandra East etc.
Speaking about their newest product, Group product manager of Google’s Next Billion Users team, Josh Woodward said “Google Search got started by connecting people to information on the web. With Neighbourly, we’re finding new ways to move forward on Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. In our research, we’ve found that most of life happens within a 1km radius of where you live, so we wanted to create a new experience for neighbours to benefit from the collective knowledge inside their neighbourhoods. And, when that happens, we hope neighbourhoods everywhere will start to feel even more neighbourly”.