Raftaar adds desi flavor to search

BANGALORE, INDIA: They may not have been able to replicate the growth story of Baidu or Yandex, but local language search options certainly made life a lot easier for the growing Internet population in the rural and semi urban parts of India.

A recent report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and IMRB states that out of 122 million active Internet users in India, over 37 percent or nearly 45 million people access content in their local languages. The scenario was entirely different 10 years back.

A growing base of the rural population was increasingly becoming aware of vernacular language content available online due to an expansion of e-governance initiatives. Therefore, creating a language agnostic search platform became essential to let people search and access the local language content available on the net. This brightened the prospects for local language search and encouraged a couple of home grown players to enter into this space.

Demand for Hindi content high

"The idea of building up a search platform in Hindi came from a rating exercise for the Panchayati Raj institutions done by us in 2004. During that project, we noticed that the demand for Hindi content was quite high among the growing Internet population of India," said Peeyush Bajpai, the co-founder of Hindi search portal raftaar.in.

Unlike the other vertical search engines, Raftaar chose to focus on a variety of Hindi language content available online. Raftaar provides a simplified interface of portal to make the searching process a lot more easier even for the first time users.

Breaking the language barrier on the search platform and creating a sustainable business out of it was not an easy task for the players. First, the search space was heavily dominated by the global search giants Google and Yahoo, who clearly have the advantages of technology and mindshare on their sides.

Second, a deep understanding of the language was also essential to reap the demographic dividend. Unfortunately, most of the start-up efforts in India who lapped up the opportunity, failed to deliver it successfully.

There are some players in the search space, who not only did things a bit differently, but built up a sustainable business out of it. Being from an economic research background, Raftaar had a clear roadmap in mind when it chose to build an integrated search portal in Hindi.

The local language support on the search platform was not very impressive, and hence, there used to be a major gap between what you actually search for and what the search engines throw up for you. Indexing and improving the readability of the content were the two major challenges the regional search engine players needed to overcome.

Build own search mechanism

To address these issues, Raftaar decided to build on its own search mechanism and present them in the form of a portal, which streamlines and simplifies the process of searching for the users. "We have developed a couple of solutions to overcome the language and legacy font issue, and then launched an alpha version of search engine in 2005, where we integrated some of those solutions," said Peeyush Bajpai.

Rather than providing a vanilla search platform, Raftaar tried to provide an easy interface allowing the users choose and access content from a wide range of topics available on the portal. It has integrated new and innovative features like e-kalam (an online Hindi typing and font conversion tool) and shabdkosh (dictionary and translation service) to its portal, which actually helps them to get lot of traffic.

Though the market looks promising for the local search players in the long run, it is extremely important for them to scale up and find a sustenance model as well. For instance, Raftaar gets 9 million page views a month and 2.5 million unique visitors per month, and the scoreboard is heavily tilted to the Google and Yahoo's sides, which get unique visitors close to 1 billion per month.

Focus on mobile Internet users

Aware of these challenges, going forward, Raftaar wants to focus on the growing mobile Internet users and develop dedicated search applications on the mobile platform.

Bajpai said: "The mobile and tablet space for the regional content is poised to grow phenomenally in the next few years. Hence, we will be taking our solutions onto the mobile platform as well. We will invest in building up dedicated apps, which can make the Hindi search options more convenient to the increasing number of mobile Internet users."