Ask Guruji

India has now joined the bandwagon of International search engines after Google, MSN, Yahoo and ask.com, with its very own guruji.com. It’s the brain child of Anurag Dod and Gaurav Mishra and its too early to claim that they are India’s very own Larry Page and Sergey Brin but we sure can applaud their efforts.

Guruji differentiates itself from other global players by indexing only Indian content and by offering a local search product that delivers the phone numbers and addresses to users.

The founders say they have developed proprietary algorithms that are used to classify and identify Indian content. The web crawlers look for certain properties in the content to ascertain its Indianess.

Why guruji? India has been the spiritual guru/leader of the world, now it's seeking to become the guru of the IT space. I don’t think we are far behind. After all, we seem to be the hotspot for most foreign companies to set their shop.

A very interesting statistics report thrown up in a study conducted by IAMAI (Internet and Mobile Association of India) said that 65 million people use search engines everyday and the size of the search engine advertising is $50 million and fast growing.

Guruji, as a part of their ing effort, has also added new features like guruji in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam. This makes it more relevant to the Indian audience.

What is interesting to note is, unlike other search buttons this one reads ‘Search India’. In a way it truly helps you discover India, the content is very India specific and allows you to go right down to phone numbers with their city search engine section.

I like the guruji gyaan section it throws up interesting trivia about India which also allows you to understand this country better. They could use this as one of their marketing strategies since no other search engine has such a feature. Guruji’s Gyaan sounds almost sacred.

Here are some that I Liked

"Prem Nazir is the only actor in the world who has acted as the lead Hero in more than 600 films (primarily Malayalam)! In 1979, a record 39 films were released with the actor as the hero."

"The Mumbai city single handedly handles about 25% of the Domestic Airline and 38% of the international air passenger traffic in the country."

"The game of Kabaddi was introduced at the 9th Asian Games hosted by India at New Delhi in the year 1982."

"Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani better known as Dhirubhai Ambani,was born on December 28, 1932, at Chorwad, Gujarat. He began his entrepreneurial career by selling bhajias to pilgrims in Mount Girnar over the weekends."

"Karsanbhai Patel, the man behind the hugely successful 'Nirma brand, named the detergent powder Nirma after his daughter Nirupama "

I am sure like me there are many who didn’t know this.

The look and feel of this site is that of Google. Plain, clean and simple. The only difference is guruji is far more local, and you get a lot more Indian content. You can get phone numbers, addresses, road names and directions. In all, it also serves as your local directory.

Like Google they also have blogs and keep users and readers both updated on the latest on guruji.

I wouldn’t credit Anurag and Gaurav for being original, but more for being relevant. For someone traveling to India for the first time I think he would be better of asking Guruji and taking his advice than googling for information. Likewise, if I am looking for a restaurant in Bangalore, it would only make sense for me to ask Guruji rather than Google it.