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Home > Business > PTI > Report


IIT grads launch local Internet search engine

October 12, 2006 17:07 IST

Guruji.com, founded by two Delhi IIT graduates, on Thursday launched the country's first local Internet search engine, with a commitment of $7 million from a leading Indian venture capital firm.

Aimed at the Indian web consumer, Guruji.com is focussed on providing better search results by leveraging proprietary algorithms and data in the Indian context, its co-founder and CEO Anurag Dod said.

Anurag Dod and co-founder and chief operating officer Gaurav Mishra, with significant Internet and search experience returned from the Silicon Valley to start Guruji.com after Sequoia Capital India provided seed funding to the venture. "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," Dod said.

A study by the Internet and Mobile Association of India says there are about 65 million people who use search engines in India and the current size for search engine advertising is $ 50 million.

Mishra said 90 per cent of Internet search queries were local in nature and Guruji.com would deliver better search results than any other search engine.

Dod said there were 38 million Internet users in India and it was expected to grow to 100 to 200 million in the next couple of years, thereby, offering a huge potential.

In the first couple of months, they expect a traffic of 100,000 hits a day, they said, pointing out that 90 per cent of Indian internet users do a search every day. At a later stage, they expect releases in different Indian vernacular languages also.

Crawl technology used by Guruji.com is a complex computing system that crawls the web identifying Indian content using sophisticated algorithms.

It 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, they said.

Mishra said they were growing database and would first focus on top 20 cities where there is a reasonable amount of Internet penetration.



© Copyright 2006 PTI. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of PTI content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent.

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Number of User Comments: 11




Sub: Cool stuff!!

The local search is pretty neat and much needed in India. The GUI is not very appealing but the results seem to be quite like ...


Posted by atul





Sub: Bad search results

The search results was not impressive at all. Some obvious searches such as university names do not show the university home page!


Posted by tapas





Sub: Good initiative

It was a good initiative, but the look 'n' feel is very bad. Also, the name should be reconsidered. Everything else is okay.


Posted by Joger





Sub: well well

not long before govt imposes tax on web crawlers as they consume the bandwidth of the hosting site! why should i let some unknown guy ...


Posted by Alok





Sub: Server Busy.

The look and feel is same as that of Google. Also when we tried to hit the site with three different machines it shows "Server ...


Posted by vish




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