Ask guruji
Ranjan Srivastava
Type Jessica on Google and you will get 111,000,000 results in just 0.10 seconds. But there is hardly any result in first 10 pages that are related to Jessica lal. With same search, on guruji you feel a difference. Here you get most of the results about Jessica lal case. It has very few results compared to Google and it also never mentions the time factor. But it gives you the results that are India specific. You can type cracker, and you will get results about Diwali, Crackers, Cracks in UPA coalition and Cracking IITs/IIMs etc. The same search on Google gives you lot of results and sometimes you may be confused in the jungle of data.
The second difference with guruji is city specific search. Type schools in Noida on guruji and you will get a list of 56 schools in Noida with their address and phone numbers. On google you will get nearly 2 lakh results, but no specific list or address.
As its name suggests, guruji is primarily an Indian search engine. Launched just a fortnight ago, it is first crawler based search engine for India and India related content. With an investment of Rs 31.5 crore by an Indian venture capital firm Sequoia Capital guruji.com is the innovative idea of two ex-IITians Anurag Dod and Gaurav Misra. Anurag Dod, co-founder and CEO, guruji.com claims that there is a need for an Indian search engine, which can help our people, and people who visit our country find what they are looking for. The search is more specific here. What sets us apart is our focus on the Indian market and the Indian consumer. We have worked very hard to build the best local search product in the market.
Gaurav Mishra, co-founder and COO, guruji.com explains, ?90% of Internet search queries are local in nature, and guruji.com will deliver better search results than any other search engine in these instances. For example, if a user types a search ?Pizza in Koramangala, Bangalore ? or ?Chinese restaurant Juhu, Mumbai? the user will be able to see local business listings as well as articles, reviews, blogs, or any other web references.?
The ex-IIT Delhi duo has an eye on Indian search market, which is of Rs 2.3 billion annually. Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) data show that bout 65 million people in India use search engines, with every user spending on an average 20 hours a week browsing the net for data and information, including news. Dod says that with an Internet user base of 40 million and growing at about 50 percent annually, the potential for search engine usage is enormous. Though a majority of the netizens still log into the net for e-mails, the study shows about 90 percent of them also use the search engine with queries for local content.
Guruji.com is currently available in English, but Dod has plans to extend it in vernacular languages very soon. Guruji currently covers 30 million web pages and about 20 main cities of the country. In next six months it has plans to extend its services in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Bengali.
Guruji is targeting 100,000 hits per day over the next six months. It has adopted the technology that can challenge global Internet search players in the subcontinent. Dod says that he has plans to target Indian diaspora worldwide for searching India-specific data, information and publications in English and vernaculars.
With the emergence of guruji, desi web has entered a new phase. The days are over when Indian Net users had to wander the entire web for a neighborhood information. guruji brings India related content on the web and organizes it in such a way that user gets the most relevant results fast. Dod claims that his team of young, dynamic and passionate engineers from India¿s premier institutes like the IITs, IISc and other top engineering colleges, is working arduously to make this product better each day. If this experiment succeeds, the Indian user will experience the magic of next-generation search on the web.
The writer can be contacted at ranjan1174@gmail.com