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I first wrote about Guruji.com the day of the press release on Oct 12th. As expected, there has been a lot of news all over the media and quite a lot of comments/discussions here on iLeher because:
1. It drew comparisons with the media and investors’ darling Google
2. Search is hot (all Internet users today search because of the information overload on the web, and every searcher is unknowingly a potential customer)
3. They are funded by Sequoia - one of the most successful VC firms in Silicon Valley
4. They have a smart and experienced team on board

I myself being a software professional working in the field of search, have special interest in the technology and so I have been actively following and participating in various discussions about what could it mean for Indian internet industry. Obviously there has been a lot of speculation whether it will replace Google in India, or just add to the list of previous attempts like byindia.com, khoj.com etc, or they will rule Local search. In this post I summarize what they are doing and what direction they could possibly go. The timing could not be better as just today there was an interview with Anurag Dod (the CEO of Guruji.com) on Podtech India, where he talks a bit about their plans that confirms what I wrote in the first post about Guruji.com about indexing local languages.

• I do NOT think they compete head to head with Google India in WEB search. Their homepage has only two tabs “India” and “Local”. They are optimized to support search for Indian content, which is not always what Indian searchers are looking for. For example, there may be a student who wants to search for the latest trends in their research area and in that case a localized search engine will be of little benefit.

• I like to think of them more as “Local” search engine, which I think is a big opportunity. Local search in two ways:
• Local search at India level: If you wanted to find out about the latest happenings about Bollywood or research projects happening in Indian Universities, etc. Search results rankings can be tweaked to improve the relevance based on various factors like whether the result is coming from a site containing mostly Indian content, what people in India generally like etc. One interesting scenario is for a query like “Taj Mahal”, you may not necessarily get the best result from an Indian or India related site. You may find the best info on Taj Mahal from wikipedia (which is predominantly not an Indian or Indian content related site), so should the India specific search engine include that result or not?
• Local search at individual city level: If you wanted to find out what are the local Thai restaurants in your area, the max you could find today is the yellow page listings from different sites. This is where Guruji.com can help by providing the information in a much richer format. It can provide listings (like it does currently), maps, the restaurant websites, sites talking about reviews, etc. One notable player in this area is Onyomo (more on this later)

• Probably more important feature is support for searching local language content. I wrote about this on my earlier post and Anurag confirms this in the interview. India has at least 5-6 major languages used by a non-trivial number of people (there is no English newspaper in the list of top 10 daily newspapers in India) and it is only a matter of time that there will be more and more sites hosting content in these languages. Currently Google/Yahoo do not support that and having this will position Guruji in a unique position, so they can search all Indian content regardless of the language.

The bottomline is that it will take some time for the verdict to be out. There is no doubt that there is a lot of potential and work to be done in the Local search area. I also think now that local search is becoming common in India, Google/Yahoo/MSN will try to make an entry and that’s when things will really start getting heated up. Love to hear your comments/thoughts here.

Rediff reports the launch of Guruji.com, a web search engine focused for Indian markets. The venture is funded by Sequoia Cap India and some angel investors. Reading this article immediately brings up the question if the company is trying to emulate what Baidu.com did in China. Baidu is the leading search engine in China with more than 60% market share, while Google has around 25%. So what were the factors that led to Baidu trashing the seemingly unconquerable behemoth Google in United States?

• The biggest reason: It has always obeyed the censorship laws in China. Google, for a long time maintained its position that information should be free and unrestricted. Turns out they finally gave in thanks to receding market share and have agreed to provide indication when the content is restricted.
• Baidu was founded in 1999 on the eve on Internet burst in United States when Google still wasn’t big.
• It implemented paid search advertisements model before Google in China. So they already had a good revenue model.

Unfortunately, most of these factors do not hold for Guruji.com. Global biggies like Google and Yahoo already have their presence in search engine market in India. There are no major censorship laws in India. Obvious question then is what is the value add that they could provide to users to stand out among the crowd?
From technology point of view, I think they can be following:

• One thing that they are already doing which Google or Yahoo do not provide is local search. Local search is a very useful (and popular in other countries) feature and they could use the early mover advantage here.
• If they can index content from local languages and make it searchable. Reason: As the number of Internet users keeps increasing in urban as well as rural India, more and more players are going to start (or already starting) providing content in local languages. There needs to be a good way to let users input search terms in other languages and provide best results.
• Mobile penetration in India is already huge and is growing at alarmingly high rate. If they provide mobile interface to search the web, they can attract at least 5 times more customers immediately compared to Web only interface.
• If they can target the demographics of the Indian population and serve up their results accordingly. For example according to NYTimes [free registration reqd], analysts say Baidu is playing to a different audience than Western Internet companies because the Chinese are far more interested in entertainment than news, books or car rental rates.

Other than the above features, following factors could also play a role:

• Ecommerce and Search Engine Marketing is still small in India. So potentially if they can innovative other business models?
• This may be far-fetched for Search but still just to speculate: If they could use the concept of “Assisted Internet”? Lot of online players in India these days have offline centers/kiosks where they help people with their services. An example is Shaadi Point by Shaadi.com. This is primarily to cater to the audience that do not have access to Internet at home or have not used computers enough to do things on their own.

We will wait and watch what happens, but more services and competition is always good for consumers!

Update: The Hindu has some more details on the company.