Description

Guruji.com, a Bangalore based start up company, was setup in October 2006 by two young entrepreneurs Anurag Dod and Gaurav Mishra, both IIT graduates from Delhi. Guruji.com is India’s first Search Engine, backed by Sequoia Capital India (the same VCs who funded Google in its early stage). Guruji.com is the first internet search engine in India to have introduced the “city search” feature. With Guruji city search, users can search for hotels, gymnasiums, dentists, restaurants, beauty parlors and other local businesses across more than 34 cities. They plan to expand the city search coverage to 50 cities by 2008 end..

Apart from English, Guruji.com also provides search in 5 Indian languages - Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Hindi. It plans to add Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi and Gujarati soon. Through Guruji Indian language search users can search on diverse Indian language content like news, entertainment, travel, business, astrology, education and more.

The recently launched Guruji Movie Timing search, helps users with movie timing related information in over 12 cities across more than 325 theatres. The search gives users the freedom to search for movies in a particular theatre, movies in a particular language or even based on actor. One can get precise timing of a movie along with contact details, reviews, trailers and stills. It also provides the option of booking the ticket online, wherever this facility is available. The search currently covers Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, Nagpur, Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Mangalore and Lucknow.

The company focuses on developing high quality search products for enhancing the Indian user experience by using proprietary crawl technology. This technology used by guruji.com, is a complex computing system that crawls the web identifying high quality content using sophisticated algorithms. The technology is built on a distributed architecture that can scale with the growing needs of the users. 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.

The coming months would see Guruji.com being marketed and the technology being enhanced to challenge the global internet search players in India like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.




Why is the search space so hot?

The Internet is becoming the main tool for people to find anything and everything including local businesses. This would only increase as more and more information is created on the web (local businesses, news, events information and so on). Search has become fundamental to how the users discover this information. Shoppers, buyers, and prospects navigate the Web to research, consider, and buy any kind of product or service, large or small. This makes “search” one of the hottest topics in online marketing and is critical to sales, visibility, advertising -- even branding. Search is getting local, and everyone from a small restaurant to the local pizza joint are considering campaigns. This is where we watch the trends.

According to the IAMAI report, the searches by Indians every month is over 1 billion. The number of advertisers targeting Indian web users is over 40,000. The estimated total annualized spend by all advertisers targeting Indian users is Rs. 236 crores (US$52m). Total annualized spend by Indian advertisers targeting Indian users Rs. 72 crores (US$16m).The IAMAI estimates that there would be 52m internet users in India by March 2008. It is estimated that as high as 90% of internet search queries are local in nature. Guruji.com sees a huge opportunity in delivering better search results in this context


Guruji.com - The Aspiration

Guruji.com is innovating around technology solutions that will solve the ever growing search needs of the Indian consumer. Guruji's aspiration lies in being the most preferred search engine in the Indian market by focusing on the peculiar n