Google Neighbourly

» see neighbourly.google as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Neighbourly was built for a country I do not live in, aimed at a problem I do not have. It was a Google app made for India, one of the products from the Next Billion Users program that tried to fit Google's habits to places where the first phone somebody owned was cheap and the questions people asked were extremely local.

The idea was neighbors answering neighbors. You could ask the app something a search engine or a map could not really tell you, like which nearby pharmacy stayed open late or where the water tanker stopped that morning, and the people around you answered it. Google launched it in beta in Mumbai in May 2018 and pushed it out to Delhi and other Indian cities over the next year.

People did answer. Google later said more than a million questions got answers on the app. It still was not enough. On 1 April 2020 Google announced Neighbourly would close, and on 12 May 2020 it shut for good. Anyone who had used it could pull their data out through Google Takeout until October of that year.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

The bet underneath it was that hyperlocal knowledge lives in people, not in databases. Google is very good at indexing the web, and terrible at knowing whether the one specific shop on your street is open right now. Neighbourly tried to route around that by making the neighbors themselves the index, with a friendly interface and voice input for people who did not want to type.

~ the decline ~

Community apps only work above a certain density. If too few people near you are on it, your question sits there with no answer, and an unanswered question is worse than no app at all. Reaching that density city by city is slow and expensive, and Google is not a patient company with products that do not take off fast. WhatsApp groups already did a lot of this work informally, without an install.

~ the day it died ~

The shutdown notice was plain and a little sad in its honesty. The app had not grown the way they had hoped, so it was going away. That is the standard Google epitaph, and Neighbourly got the same one as dozens of other experiments. What made this one particular is that it was reaching for something real, the local knowledge no search box holds, and it still could not gather enough of it to survive.

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