Search engine goes swadeshi

BANGALORE: Aiming to address the `search` needs of the Indian online community, venture backed Guruji.com, launched its search engine that according to company is the first of its kind ‘search engine’ for the Indian online community.

The company also plans to launch search engines for the vernacular languages in another two months.

Conceptualized by Anurag Dod and Gaurav Mishra, ex-IIT Delhi alumni, Guruji.com has got $7 million commitment by Sequoia Capital India. Sequoia Capital India, a Mauritius based Indian venture capital fund with approximately $350 million under management and had earlier funded Google, Yahoo, Paypal and Youtube.

Speaking at the launch of the search engine here, Anurag Dod, Co-Founder & CEO, Guruji.com, explained the need of starting the search engine targeted for the Indian web users. 

“Indian online community is growing at a rapid pace and global search engines are falling short to meet the search needs of average Indian web consumer” said Anurag, adding that Guruji.com will try to fill this vacuum and try to serve the search needs of Indian web user.

Corroborating Anurag’s view, Gaurav Mishra, Co-Founder & COO, Guruji.com said, “Ninety per cent of Internet search queries are local in nature and therefore provides ideal platform for Guruji.com to enter and tap this market.”

“Crawl Technology, used by Guruji.com, is a complex computing system that crawls the web identifying Indian content using sophisticated algorithms,” he said, replying to a question on the technology used behind Guruji.com.

“The technology is built on a distributed architecture and crawls the web, indexes the data that it gathers and provides the user with a simple keyword based interface to get to the data quickly and efficiently” said Gaurav. “The strong proprietary algorithms will be leveraged to help Indian web consumers arrive at better if not the best results,” he added.

Co-Founder & COO of Guruji.com also said the company will be using traditional pay-by-click revenue model and expects to break even after one-and-a-half-years. The company has a repository of 25-30 million web pages and expects 1,00,000 hits a month.

Talking about the tie-up, Sumir Chadha, Managing Director, Sequoia Capital India said, “Since Indian online search market is growing at a rapid pace and Guruji.com addresses this market, the company has partnered with Guruji.com as their product is great and the talent that Guruji.com brings to table is also very exciting.“

© CIOL Bureau