What do you do when you dont have content? You create it. But wait. We are talking about huge amount of local content. And the best people to create it are the people using these local businesses every day. Let’s throw in these users to manage the scale of this problem. And the solution is “social activity and review based search engine”. Players like Burrp and Yelp have this angle. And I think they have a better shot to answer local queries in India.

Google actually gets reviews from yelp and citysearch at maps.google.com as a special tab. IMHO guruji and onyomo will have to do something similar.

Your point is well taken. Like I wrote in an earlier post, I believe local content and alternative interface are going to be the key drivers for Guruji’s growth.

Onyomo and JustDial are going to be a competitor to look for as far as these areas are concerned.

Madhur

In my option the key to success for a search engine like Guruji as rightly identified by Vaibav is local content, how much local information do you get looking beyond pizzas in Bangalore today? The Indian web spear is woefully short of local content that today.

Secondly the Indian users base needs need to reach the 100 million mark that we are talking about. Currently we are stuck at the 30 ~ 40 million levels for some time now.

Having said that it is for sites such as Guruji to take the challenge and address this, there is a big market soon to get ripe !!

All the best Anurag & Gaurav

Enabling search with local language input is something that the biggies have ignored so far. I hope the guys at Guruji think about it.

[self-promotion alert] Meanwhile, we at http://www.pdstext.com have solved that problem for Tamil users, to begin with. You can search Google, Yahoo! and MSN in Tamil directly from within the site. We plan to add support for other major Indian languages. [self-promotion ends]

But never the less, the crawler algorithm is pretty efficient. I did find in few case, close to what ever I was looking for in guruji.

From http://www.thebrandreporter.com/perl/tbr/afaqs_link.html
“Raftaar.com lets users to search online content in Hindi by typing the keyword using its phonetic equivalent in Roman letters. For instance, keying in ‘bazaar’ leads to the Hindi word for ‘market.’ According to Peeyush Bajpai, Raftaar is not the conventional search engine. It integrates features like spell check and cluster search which is category-specific.”

Great points. While the local language data may not be a whole lot right now, there is a fair bit of agreement in the circles that it will rise with Internet penetration increasing at a healthy rate. The search problem does get tricky when handling different languages esp. when you start doing advanced stuff like natural language parsing, concept searches, etc. Another interesting thing is building a good UI to let users enter their query in a non-clunky way. And the fact that there maybe 5 or 6 different ones in India will make that only worse, Having said that, it may be that its already in the works at other places like BigG and Y!, so I cant really comment on barrier to entry for them, but for a starter, definetely yes. I also think that the investment on this depends on whether it makes sense to invest in building this technology compared to the the revenues you can get out of this as the online advertising market in India right now is only a fraction of other markets like US or even China.

Agree with you on local search. To be really comprehensive in India about the content, there has to be data from alternate sources such as yellow pages, directory listings, etc. I am researching a bit more in this area and will be posting about that in the future if I get any meaningful information.

For local language content, how much content is to be crawled? How difficult it is incrementally for Google or Yahoo? Is there is fundamentally basic problem like chinese language search, in hindi or marathi or tamil?

For local search, I think the problem really centers around lack of the base local content itself, to search across.

We have been considering/thinking through this at Better Labs and all the recent momentum in the space is awesome. It definitely helps to see more opinions which can help extrapolate what the users want. So far, local search is clearly the message I am seeing from most of the blog posts and comments.