The Indian internet landscape is getting more competitive by the day. Not only is it widening in breath, it is also getting deeper. Search engines have traditionally been at the heart of how the internet works, and we now have multiple local search engines to choose from. The latest (and most promising) entrant to this field is Guruji, which launched last week.

Guruji is a crawler based local search engine that focuses on Indian content. It has been co-founded by these two ex-IIT Delhi guys who have a strong professional background. They have the backing of Sequoia Capital for venture funding and Suvir Sujan (who co-founded Bazzee) as an angel investor. It is not entirely insignificant to note that Sequoia was one of the earliest investors in Google.

Off course if its about search, comparisons to Google are inevitable. Google’s search algorithm is almost like an industry benchmark and other search engines are likely to be assessed in terms of how closely they can replicate what Google does. But if my understanding of Guruji is correct, it is trying to do what Google does best, but in a very different way. To understand this better, you first need to understand how Google works for Indian content. Let me explain-

Google/Yahoo crawl the entire web and then categorize the content as Indian or not. It still retains the non-Indian content in its database and that content is included in Indian search results but gets lower priority. What Guruji does is in sharp contrast to Google’s approach. It discovers the content while crawling, stores only the India related content and throws out the irrelevant (non-Indian) data. This technique allows Guruji to crawl more, go deeper and hence index more India related data.

To understand Guruji’s second differentiator, take a look at this FAQ from its website - “Guruji currently has the data for Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata……….free to submit any business listing you think is important and is missing“. When I first read this, it didn’t make any sense to me. How on earth is web indexing co-related to city specific data? I needed help from Guruji’s founder, Anurag Dod, who made me understand this better. Guruji calls this local (yellow pages) search. Using this section of their website (which seems to be an atomized listing of Indian websites), you can submit your establishment’s url for indexing. And when a query comes up, the user will get not only the web search results but also the business listing (almost like a yellow page listing). This feature is Guruji’s innovation and no other search engine does anything like this.

I think this local search is a very innovative feature. I also feel that this feature will almost work as a counter measure to Google’s very successful adwords program. Not convinced? Ok, let me explain how. I queried for “chinese food south delhi” on both Guruji and Google. The results are shown in the attached screenshots. On Google, you get a bunch of results and you also get a few featured adwords links on the right. On Guruji, the first difference is that the basic results seem more detailed and specific. Secondly, the local search (shown above the basic search results) lists two specific establishments, complete with their address/telephones. Now, isn’t that what the adwords program is supposed to do. This is my hypothesis. I tried to verify this, using other search queries as well but the results are not conclusive, probably because Guruji’s database is still very young and sparsely populated . Because of which, current comparisons of search queries on Google and Guruji would probably not be fair. We need to let Guruji gain traction before making judgments.

Anurag informed me that their future revenue model will be based on search engine ads (PPC) What I didn’t ask him was whether this is Google adwords or are they planning to have an advertising engine of their own as well?

I think Guruji is a very promising prospect. It has the right people backing it (i.e. founders, investors). And it is not trying to benchmark itself to what the Goliath in this field (Google) does. This is important, for one would need to think out of the box, in order to break Google’s stranglehold on Indian search.

While on local search, let me revisit two applications that I have reviewed in the past.

Onyomo- this is also a very promising local search engine, though its modus operandi is different from that of a classic search engine. For details, check out my earlier review. Its capabilities for local listing (or yellow pages search) overlaps with Guruji. It also has a very interesting mashup of city level maps with the search queries. Unfortunately it is available only in Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai (future). In these cities, its search results are vastly superior to what Guruji gives at present (because of its modus operandi of adding content to its database).

MapmyIndia- this is the online mapping application that I reviewed a few weeks back and while it is not a search engine, it has a fairly potent local search section. You can search for services, facilities etc in the cities and they are marked out visually in the maps. It works fine, though the listings database needed to be better populated (when I reviewed it). And it has a pan-India coverage.

I am aware of another India focused search application that is currently under development (in the stealth mode). I have been shown a private demo but unfortunately, I can’t talk about it at this stage (I promised those guys). I think that’s very interesting as well.

Overall I feel that in about 6-12 months, these search applications are likely to become more mature. That’s when we shall really get to understand how capable they actually are. And its entirely possible that in the not too distant future, if you want to search local in India, you’d head to one of these, rather than Google. Webyantra says Amen with a capital A!