IIT grads launch India's first Internet search engine

Guruji.com, founded by two Delhi IIT graduates, on Thursday launched the country's first local Internet search engine, with a commitment of $7 million from a leading Indian venture capital firm.

Aimed at the Indian web consumer, Guruji.com is focussed on providing better search results by leveraging proprietary algorithms and data in the Indian context, its co-founder and CEO Anurag Dod said.
Anurag Dod and co-founder and chief operating officer Gaurav Mishra, with significant Internet and search experience returned from the Silicon Valley to start Guruji.com after Sequoia Capital India provided seed funding to the venture. "What sets us apart is our focus on the Indian market and the Indian consumer. We have worked very hard to build the best local search product in the market," Dod said.
A study by the Internet and Mobile Association of India says there are about 65 million people who use search engines in India and the current size for search engine advertising is $ 50 million.

Mishra said 90 per cent of Internet search queries were local in nature and Guruji.com would deliver better search results than any other search engine.
Dod said there were 38 million Internet users in India and it was expected to grow to 100 to 200 million in the next couple of years, thereby, offering a huge potential.

In the first couple of months, they expect a traffic of 100,000 hits a day, they said, pointing out that 90 per cent of Indian internet users do a search every day. At a later stage, they expect releases in different Indian vernacular languages also.
Crawl technology used by Guruji.com is a complex computing system that crawls the web identifying Indian content using sophisticated algorithms.
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, they said.
Mishra said they were growing database and would first focus on top 20 cities where there is a reasonable amount of Internet penetration.

Anurag has 10+ years of extensive software engineering experience which includes key contribution in two successful startups. As an Engineering Manager in Wisenut Search Engine, he was instrumental in developing its Core Search Technology and has a patent pending for that. Wisenut was acquired by LookSmart in 2002. He also held senior engineering positions in EBay, Synopsis and Delsoft. Anurag holds B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Delhi and Masters in Computer Science from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. While at IIT Delhi he was a recipient of Summer Undergraduate Research Award .

Gaurav has over 10+ years of software development and has worked in senior engineering positions for Microsoft, Pillar Data Systems and Nokia. In his previous assignment in Intellisync which got acquired by Nokia, Gaurav was the architect for design and development of an instant messaging solution for Blackberry, Treo and other PDA’s. He has extensive experience in startups and large companies and has played a key role in shipping complex system software products. Gaurav holds a B.Tech from IIT Delhi in Computer Science and a Masters of Science from State University of New York, Buffalo .