The other day I was reading my favorite newspaper “The Telegraph”. I usually don’t have time to read weekly extras but often check those pages if there is something interesting! One such extra featured page is “Jobs” that has advertisements for all the openings around the country and sometimes international advertisements too. While I don’t look for all those vacancy advertisements as I am really content with my current position- I like to check on the featured profiles of those who made it big in their respective fields. And I found the profiles of Anurag Dod and Gaurav Mishra – co-founders of guruji.com the very own Indian search engine.

Both of them hail from typical middle class families and are products of the famed Indian education machine – the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). They met at the IIT, Delhi from where both of them got their BTech degrees. Afterwards both of them went on to work in the dreamland (USA) as software professionals and worked in companies like Synopsys, Microsoft, eBay, Nokia. But now both of them are back to India and running a popular local search engine.

So what made them leave their lucrative jobs and venture out in a competitive world dominated by giants like Google and Yahoo?

“During late 2005, I began evaluating search engines available for India and their strength and weaknesses, I realized that Indian Internet penetration was growing exponentially and there was no focused search product at that time. The idea of India focused search engine hit me. I shared this with Gaurav whom I knew from my IIT, Delhi days. We had long discussions till we were both convinced that an India focused search engine was needed and it would give us a huge opportunity to serve the Indian market. Once we were convinced, we took the plunge”

Says Dod.

But with portals like Yahoo and Google around is there any need for a desi (indigenous) version?

“Yes there is” says Dod. Explaining he says

“Various search intents need to be better served whether it is information related, movie timing or city related-searches. Search results need to be put I the Indian context- an Indian user searching for “Prime Minister” is more likely to be looking for Prime Minister of India. We were pioneers in this field (of customization) and now big players like Google, Yahoo and MSN are doing it”.

Indeed, these two young entrepreneurs have done great things with Guruji. After lots of search test, I found that Guruji has more customized search features than the big players. One can easily search the movie times in a particular city, where to book tickets, college information =the list goes endless. It also offers multilingual search feature where surfers can search in their own language. Both Anurag and Gaurav have one dream – “To see Guruji becoming the best and the most popular search engine in India”.

Well, all my best wishes with you guys.

Posted on February 13th, 2008 by John
Filed under: All Other Search Engines