India’s leading local search engine Justdial has launched a free Android app which lets you search for businesses in your neighbourhood or city, just like its website or call-in service. The app is available to Justdial users both in India and the United States, the only two countries it currently operates in.
Justdial, like its name suggests, lets you call a number from any phone and request information about businesses in your city. Want to know the name of the nearest restaurant or the phone number of that car showroom you visited yesterday? Call Justdial and make your request, and it sends the requested information to you via a free text message.
It also gives you options to find more similar shops in your area. If you consent, it will even directly connect you to one of the businesses on its list. If you want to buy a product or service, Justdial offers to send your contact information to five businesses and have them compete to offer you the best price.
With the Android app, Justdial users get all of the features of the website and call-in service, and then some. The “Near Me” feature allows you to look up businesses near you, and you get options to see them plotted on Google Maps or call them from within the app. You can search for information by entering the city’s name manually as well.
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Though quite similar in features to MapmyIndia ShowNearby and plenty of other local search apps, Justdial benefits from having a comprehensive database that is far more complete, at least within India, than the Google Places database used by most other apps. It also includes reviews for its listings, but they have never been particularly trustworthy, in our experience.
Other features of the app include the ability to save listings to your address book, schedule events from within the app and send listings to others via email or text message. You can also add your own business to Justdial through the app and, if all else fails, tap on Justdial’s number to initiate a call to the service, where an agent is always eager to assist you.
Justdial is one of our favourite services in India and the company is immensely competent at what it does. Calls to Justdial are almost always answered within seconds and the agents on the other end very rarely throw their hands up in the air and inform you that they could not find something you were looking for.
The company already had a website and mobile-optimised Web app, and the launch of the Android app can only help further its spread in India and the USA, where it was recently launched.
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