Loading ...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. Read ahead….
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What exactly does Guruji.com does today and what would they be doing going forward? How are they different from Google India or China’s search king Baidu? I have posted some of my thoughts on these questions at http://ileher.com/2006/10/22/more-on-gurujicom-web-search-or-local-search/
I respectfully disagree because Google and Yahoo are still the best search engines for Indian content and there is really no local search engine that delivers, unless I am totally missing something here. Also while there is a huge opportunity in local search, especially with a strong mobile angle, there is a severe lack of local content to search across. Yellow pages, which form the foundation of bulk of the US local search services, are not up to the mark yet in India and most of them are closed with hardly any APIs to build services around. I wrote more here: http://blog.indiagoes.com/?p=36. And totally agree with Madhur here.
On a related note, Google announces co-op search http://www.google.com/coop/ .Now anyone can build their own customized Search engine .
Ravi:
Google’s Coop definitely adds an interesting angle to this, generic Indian web search or even local search or local indian job search. Google’s CSE is however not really flexible in allowing a programmer to tweak and structure the results. It definitely hurts a lot of the pure play vertical search engines and it will be interesting to see how this evolves.
Ravi:
While customizable search engines from G and Y are good idea for personal websites and bloggers or maybe even corporates, I dont think it is of any use for anyone trying to make money by providing search service. As Vaibhav says, there is no flexibility there from the developer perspective to tweak relevance of the results, nor from bizdev perspective because the ads are AdSense ads which are owned by Google.
Madhur,
Your point on AdSense is well taken. In fact, that’s one of the reasons behind G’s acquisition of Youtube where it gets to keep the Ad revenues instead of the `rights holders’ ( of the video ) themselves. It could choose to part with some of it to the right holders in case if youtube has previous understandings with the biggies such as Universal Music, Fox etc.
The instant effort to Coop is also another such initiatives where G grows its biz at the developer’s creative initiatives. Ingenious indeed…!
check this indian local search out @ www.srch.in … i did look for local listings and was quiet impressed… being an expat this works well … have been using this service for over a month… dont know why they are not marketing this site
The activity in India web search is sure to heat up with more and more startups offering a variety of search solutions. Avake, a California based startup recently launched two vertical search engines both focused on India market.
TolMol.com, a Local Comparison Shopping Site and
Gladoo.com, a Job Search Engine
Obviously, the ones with substance will survive the competition. But it’s great to see such solutions entering India market.