Guruji – Indias own search engine

Two IIT Delhi graduates, Anurag Dod and Gaurav Mishra, have launched Guruji.com, an internet search engine that aims to provide a comprehensive search for Indian content.

Guruji.com has received a seed fund of $7 million from Sequoia Capital India (formerly WestBridge Capital), a venture capital firm. Suvir Sujan, founding partner, Nexus India Capital, has also invested in the internet search company.

Adopting the pay-per-click model to generate revenues, the company expects to break-even in 1.5 years. Guruji.com at present offers search data in three Indian languages – Hindi, Kannada and Telgu and would soon also provide search data in Tamil and Bengali.

With nearly 90 per cent of internet search queries being local in nature an engine like Guruji.com is expected to provide more relevant content to its users. With a growing internet population which is expected to grow to 100 to 200 million in the next couple of years, offer Guruji a huge potential.

The crawl technology used by Guruji.com is a complex computing system that crawls the web identifying Indian content using sophisticated algorithms. The engine then 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.

Guruji would have a growing database and it would first focus on top 20 cities where there is a reasonable amount of internet penetration.

About its founders:

Anurag Dod holds a BTech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Delhi and an MS is Comp. Sci. from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In his over 10 years of experience he was also involved in developing the core search technology at Wisenut Search Engine which was later acquired by Looksmart in 2002.

Gaurav Mishra holds a B.Tech from IIT Delhi in Computer Science and a MS from State University of New York, Buffalo. He worked for over 10 years in software engineering positions in various organisations in the US including Microsoft, Nokia.

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