Chennai: Two young IIT Delhi graduates, Anurag Dod and Gaurav Mishra, are aspiring to be the Indian counterparts of the celebrated founders of Google Inc, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

The two IITians have launched a search engine guruji.com with a revenue model and site design similar to that of Google. In addition, the duo got funding from the Indian arm of Sequoia Capital that funded Google. But the resemblance ends there.

Guruji.com is an India centric search engine and the entrepreneurs want their search engine to be ahead of others in this segment.

It was sometime in 2005 when Dod and Mishra were searching for a good Internet based business and hit upon the India focused search engine idea. It was not a blind idea-popular in the Internet domain- but based on the market trends and good logic.

The duo saw baidu.com and naver.com ranking first in China and Korea respectively ahead of the globally known names. They also looked at the media figures back home and discovered that in terms of numbers, the regional dailies commanded higher circulation figures than their English counterparts, the Indian language channels had a higher viewers than their English counterparts.

Further with more and more people from the second and third tier towns, accessing the internet, the duo saw an upsurge in the Indian language content on the web.

Given this situation Dod and Mishra were convinced that it would make good business sense to have a search engine focused on India and Indian content. The conviction brought into existence guruji.com Software Private Limited, Bangalore, that owns the search engine by the same name. Dod became the CEO and co-founder with Mishra as the COO and co-founder.

Dod had earlier worked in the US with startups that included search engine firms and the engineering manager at Wisenut a search engine that was acquired by LookSmart. Prior to Wisenut he worked with Synopsys on its flagship product, Design Compiler. Partner Mishra had worked with Microsoft, Pillar Data Systems and Intellisync, which was later acquired by Nokia. At Intellisync he was the architect for designing and developing an instant messaging solution for BlackBerry, Treo and other PDAs.

Ready to sweat it out, the duo got $7 million funding from Sequoia Capital India and Suvir Sujan, a founding partner with Nexus India Capital. Sujan was also the co-founder and co-CEO of bazee.com, later acquired by eBay. "I am not in a position to disclose the shareholding pattern," says Dod.

On 12 October, 2006, guruji.com was launched with a server farm in the US that indexed almost all the India related websites.

So, how is guruji.com different from Google for an Indian searcher? "It is in the results," says Dod. According to him most of the internet searches for a product or a service are location specific. Search engines like Google and Yahoo throw up hundreds of results spread out over several pages. "But that doesn''t serve the searcher''s purpose who rarely goes beyond the third page. Our engine throws up only the relevant India-centric results."

In addition the Indian search engine company has launched a city-specific search site in a tie up with yellow pages companies like Infomedia India to locate relevant local content.

According to Dod, the tie-ups with yellow pages service providers on a no-cost basis. "Later on we will move over to sharing revenue."

These differences apart guruji.com, true to its name, provides general but often useful information on its home page.

Next came the launch of Indian language sites with search facilities in Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and Tamil, with plans to add Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati and Punjabi language search engines. The unique aspect of guruji.com''s language search is the virtual keyboard that enables queries to be keyed in the choice of the user, a facility not provided by other global search engines.

But there are challenges as web pages in Indian languages pose a major challenge for search engines as they use typefaces in different fonts and not all web pages have adopted Unicode.

According to S Bhaskaran who was involved in developing the world''s first Tamil and Indian language search engine Kazhugu, "guruji''s Tamil search is really a good effort. However, it seems the search is restricted to websites that have adopted Unicode and not other encoding schemes like TAM, TAB and TSCII" and hopes that Guruji works that out.

The other major drawback in guruji is the tool bar option which other search engines offer. "We don''t have that option in Internet Explorer. In the case of Fire Fox we offer a plug in. We will soon offer the tool bar option," explains Dod.

Search for revenues
With the launch of the search engine, Dod and Mishra will soon have to start their search for revenues. "We wanted to have the product ready first. We are in the process of assembling a marketing team," says Dod.

According to him the revenue model is similar to that of other search engines like Google – sale of keywords, listing of advertisements and others. "The Indian search engine revenue market is estimated to be in the region of $50 million." In addition the duo would also look at the corporate and other websites to market their `in-site'' search solutions. "Presently we have the Mid Day and oneindia.in and a couple of others as our corporate clients," Dod says.

He is also open to a tie up with corporate website developers to sell the site search solution.

Meanwhile, the immediate plan is to popularise the search engine without substantial cash burn, say through cyber cafes. This would not only bring in more users but also talented people to work for the company.

Finding the right talent at the right price is a major challenge says Mishra, an area in which the company faces terrific competition from Google. Nevertheless the two entrepreneurs have succeeded in attracting a number of IITians on their 25-strong muster, which they hope to double..

Will guruji prove a challenge to its larger rivals to Google? Lets wait and watch.