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Guruji.com to address search nuances

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CIOL Bureau
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Ambika Prakash

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BANGALORE, INDIA: Guruji.com, an indigenous search engine, is going aggressive with product and market expansion. Anurag Dod, CEO and co-founder of Guruji.com and Gaurav Mishra, COO & co-founder, share their plans in optimizing the search engine, in an exclusive with CIOL.

Excerpts from an interview:

CIOL: Brief us about the evolution of Guruji.com?

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Anurag Dod, CEO and co-founder of Guruji.com Anurag Dod: Guruji.com, launched in October 2006, has seen good growth in the Indian and global markets. The search engine, which had its inception in English language, gradually incorporated vernacular languages, the first of its kind in India.

The site, which came into existence focusing on local search, is now targeting Indian market by offering more and more India content for its consumers. Thus, it is being recognized as an Indian search engine. These apart, other features like live cricket scores, movies in Bangalore, etc., were incorporated recently as well.

CIOL: Guruji.com is two-year old! What are its future plans?

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AD: With the growing penetration of site, it has become a priority to address the nuances in the search. Since the launch of the site, the product is not being marketed using right channels as the team is contemplating to optimize the site by having more features and content. In this regard, the team has also taken up 'viral campaign' to bring in more awareness about the product. The recent addition of ad serving platform is one more credit to the site.

CIOL: How do you distinguish your product from Google?

AD: Rather than a search engine, Guruji is seen as a consumer product. It is a search engine where search is being optimized to cater to Indian consumers. By introducing vernacular languages on the search engine, Guruji has set an example to various other portals.

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CIOL: The site is basically targeted at the Indian market? Are there any plans to enter the global market?

Gaurav Mishra: Presently, the penetration of the site is less than 5 percent and the research is on to understand the aspects of search behavior of Indians. The search engine will continue targeting Indian consumers for the next two years. However, expansion of the product and marketing is our main focus.

CIOL: What is the user base?

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AD: The search engine has registered 10 million users per month.

CIOL: What is your revenue model?

AD: The ad-serving platform, launched in the month of February 2008, is serving the purpose. Advertisements are contextual and the payment is based on cost per click. Most of the small and medium enterprises (SMEs)are coming forward to place advertisements as the advertisement method is driving profits for SMEs.

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Some of the advertisers include Easygo, Bigadda, Cleartrip, Zapak, Travelguru etc.,

CIOL: Elaborate on the functionality of your search engine?

GM: Guruji.com is built on distributed architecture and has more than 100 crawlers. The "Refresh Cycle Technology" determines the site updation, and picks up the content as and when. The frequency of updating the content happens within a couple of hours.

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CIOL: What are the criteria that determine the rank of a site on your search engine?

GM: Valuable, relevant and error-free content. Apart from content, a well-designed site and its popularity will ensure it to be ranked at the top.

CIOL: How does the crawler on your site pick up content from new sites?

GM: The crawler picks up the stories based on two options. Firstly, the submission of a new site on the search engine enables crawler to visit the site regularly. Secondly, it is also possible for the crawler to pick stories over a period of time through the network. For e.g.: The crawler visits the site 'A' regularly and the site has the links of 'B' the new site Thus, it is possible to pick up the stories of new site through the links based on network links.

CIOL: How is the data associated with keywords and links?

GM: Data and keywords go hand in hand. Keywords are the key enablers, which help in picking up related content on the search engine. Every search engine has a secret source team, which does analysis on keywords and links to aggregate more and more content.

CIOL: Is your search engine compatible with all the Web Browsers?

GM: Yes it is compatible, but the best option is Internet Explorer.

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