Two
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi graduates have returned from
the Silicon Valley to launch a home-grown search engine with loads of
Indian content.
In a bid to offer an alternative search engine
and wean away the growing community of Internet buffs from established
search engines like Google and Yahoo! Anurag Dod and Gaurav Mishra have
co-founded www.guruji.com with a $7-million (Rs.322 million) seed fund
from Sequoia Capital India, a venture capital firm.
Touted to be
the first of its kind search engine in the subcontinent, Guruji.com
aims to provide better search results to Indian users, by leveraging
proprietary algorithms and data in the Indian context.
"Our
search engine is a technology solution to address the growing search
needs of the Indian netizens. Using crawl technology, we focus on
providing search products for enhancing the Indian user experience,"
Guruji.com CEO Dod told reporters at a preview of the search engine
here Thursday.
"Built on a distributed architecture that can
scale with the growing needs of the users, our complex computing system
crawls the web to identify Indian content, indexes the data and
provides a simple keyword-based interface to access the information
instantly," he added.
According to a study conducted by the
Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), about 65 million
people use search engines, with every user spending on an average 20
hours a week browsing the net for data and information, including news.
The current market size for search engine advertising is pegged at $50
million (Rs.2.3 billion) annually.
"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," Dod
said.
Currently available in English, with about 30 million web
pages and covering about 20 main cities across the country, the company
plans to offer in the next six months a choice to search data in Indian
languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Bengali.
"Our
game plan is to offer the most comprehensive search for the Indian
content. The technology will be enhanced to challenge the global
Internet search players in the subcontinent," said Guruji.com COO
Mishra.
"The convergence of technologies and access from mobile
platform becoming a reality soon, usage of Internet search is set to
accelerate in India," he added.
Targeting 100,000 hits a day
over the next six months, the company plans to market the 'desi' search
engine through branding, event promotions and advertisement blitzkrieg.
Going
forward, the company plans to target the strong Indian diaspora
worldwide for searching India-specific data, information and
publications in English and vernaculars.
"We are aiming to
break-even in the next 18-24 months, with a host of additional
offerings such as e-mail facility, tools and links to other Indian
websites and news portals," Sequoia Capital managing director Sumir
Chadha said.
"We also plan to shift the farm of servers (40),
which are currently assembled in the US, to India once the
infrastructure backbone is built," he added.
