On Frilp, friends help you find anything you need, from a dentist to a microbrewery

What would you do if you wanted to find the best yoga class in your area? You could try Googling for it, of course, or look it up on a listings site. You might even get some rankings on review sites. But you would still have to do a lot of digging and verifying to check if it suits your timings or your need for personal attention. Is it a place where you don’t get stared at?

The more nuanced your queries, the harder it gets to find that dentist who does a great root canal or that local restaurant where the biriyani is light and not too oily and spicy or that microbrewery where the beer is fresh and the ambience not too noisy for watching the Cricket World Cup quarter-final between India and Bangladesh. So you ask a friend, instead.

But which one of your friends would know about that yoga class or microbrewery? Ideally, someone who has experienced it herself. So you start asking around or post a query on Facebook or WhatsApp. If you’re lucky, one of your friends will tell you of the perfect place. But it’s not the most efficient way of finding out what you need.

What if you had a site that could search your social networks for what you need? It would construct an intelligent query based on your needs, feed it to your networks of friends and family, and get an answer for you from the right person. And the answer is archived on the sender’s network to be accessed the next time a similar query is made.

Hard tech problem to solve

India’s Frilp – a combo of friends and help – uses advanced algorithms to suggest the shops or services you need, based on recommendations from friends and family members on your social networks and phone contacts list. Senthil K, Frilp COO and co-founder, explains to Tech in Asia why this is such a hard nut to crack:

Depending on your profile, we try to prioritize recommendations from people who have a similar lifestyle or profession as you. This we find out using data on where they work, what they do, and their behavior on social media. We call it a “trust score” and use it to predict if somebody is a friend or colleague, even if you haven’t declared that explicitly.

Those who write public reviews of products or services on sites such as Zomato or TripAdvisor constitute a minuscule percentage of the internet population. You or me don’t usually post a review of a modular kitchen we got made or that root canal we got fixed. But we do respond to friends who ask for recommendations for a dentist or an interior designer on social networks and instant messengers.

That’s the crowd that Frilp is tapping in its search for answers to your queries. Search engines can’t get you those answers because subjective queries are hard to handle.

We are sitting in a corner of the Arbor Brewing Company, a new microbrewery in Bangalore, teeming with techies and entrepreneurs from the latest Microsoft Ventures Growth Program, which includes Frilp. It’s an apt setting to discuss the next big challenge in search. As Senthil points out, “Google can help you find a dentist in Jayamahal but it can’t say who your friend consulted and liked.”