A lot of buzz was generated recently when the India based search engine Guruji received funding to the tune of $7 million from Sequoia Capital. I decided to pay my respects to Guruji and take a test drive.

Before I talk about the visual design of the site, I wanted to know more about what Guruji is. The tagline for the site is “the Indian search engine”. It wasnt obvious to me whether they meant web search or local search for India. There is a significant difference between the two – web search would imply that Guruji should crawl and display sites which target the Indian audience only. Local search would imply that Guruji displays results (mainly business listings) local to the specified city/location.

A quick review of the ‘About Us’ page reveals this:

Guruji.com is the first crawler based search engine for India and India related content. Our proprietary algorithm automatically identifies India related content on the web and organizes it in such a way that you get the most relevant results fast.

On exploring the site further, I found that they offer web search as well as local search capabilities. The site was started by Anurag Dod (CEO and Founder) and Gaurav Mishra (COO and Founder), two IIT-Delhi alums. Before the Sequoia funding, they received angel funding from Suvir Sujan (co-founder of Baazee.com).

It was time to put Guruji to the test. A search for ‘India movies’ (without the quotes) gave me pretty impressive results. By impressive I mean that the resultset included sites catering to the Indian community only. However, the quality/authority of the results on the first page (the first 10 results) was dismal. The 10th – 14th results were links to adult and porn movies. See the screenshot below:

Similarly, a search for ‘Munnabhai’ gave me results which included ‘Indian sites’ only. However, as noticed with the earlier query, the quality of the search results was very poor. The home page for the movie (http://www.munnabhaimbbs.com) did not show up in the first 20 results. I did not bother exploring further to check whether it appears in the next set of results. On the contrary, Google shows the home page as the first site in the search results — what one would normally expect.

I believe Guruji stands a fair chance in giving good results for Indian/Hindi words which have become common in mainstream English. As an example, searching for the word ‘Desi’ in Google will give you results which include links to sites about Desi Arnaz and other non-Desi stuff. In this case, Guruji restricts search results to ‘India based sites’ only. So, the results seem to be more relevant (that is of course if you are intended to search for the Indian ‘Desi’ and not Desi Arnaz).

I dont see a reason why users would prefer Guruji over Google. All that Guruji searches and indexes, Google also searches and indexes, only better. Unless, Guruji improves their search algorithm and serve top-notch results like Google. Or users want to search for ‘Hinglish’ words and leave out the non-Indian based sites. From my perspective, the real potential of Guruji lies in local search. Competing with Google in web search would be a shot in the foot. Google, however lacks the local search capabilities for India, that Guruji currently provides. A search for ‘pizza ahmedabad’ in Guruji and Google quickly highlights the difference. A search for ‘pizza bangalore’ highlights the difference even more. I believe that the local search is Guruji’s greatest asset. Going forward, I think their strategy should be to bolster their capability in local search and get a stronghold in the category.

Talking about their visual design, Guruji looks like a crude site right out of the 90′s. The layout of the site is very similar to Google, but in terms of design, they have done a very lame job. The search results are also presented in a way similar to Google. They also provide a ‘cached’ feature like Google. With the $7 million, I think (and sincerely hope) that their design is overhauled to make it more appealling. See the screenshots and decide for yourself:

Overall, I would say that Guruji earns the following scores:

Local search capability: 9/10

Web search capability: 4/10

Visual appeal: 2/10

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 19th, 2006 at 2:19 pm and is filed under India Startups. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.