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.
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