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.
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