Guruji has launched image search enabling users to search for image with touch of ‘Indian-ness’.
‘Selecting the right set of pictures and ordering them to satisfy the need on the user’s mind is a complex research problem..
Our image crawlers scour the web for candidate images and our complex ranking algorithm takes into account many factors like relevance, Indian-ness, size and quality of images before presenting the results to our users.
Other important factors like the context in which the image occurred on the web and the recency of the image are also factored in.’- blog
The image search has been seeded with explore page that has image from few categories like Actors, Actresses, Bikes/Cars etc. – overall, good stuff, but here are a few question for ye all:
Qn to Guruji team – how long do you plan to stay in beta? – Core product is expected to be in out of beta asap and Guruji has been in the business for almost 2 years.
Qns to readers – Do you use Guruji search? What feedback do you have for them?
As far as I am concerned, I am not sure of what intent are they trying to capture – they have web/movie/music and even city search (lacks relevance) – and somehow, all of these pertain to different users’ intents. And the core, i.e. web search just doesn’t stands out.
What’s your take on Guruji?
i always see Guruji on this blog only
but never used.
guruji image search is not Showing Ashish Sinha’s pic though his ranking is high in Google Image search Results.
How relevance is that ?. If indian pics are on flickr and other western photo sharing sites [as we many do], is guruji will diplay them ? by crawling.
As most of indian ppl data is on western side, how guruji will display data by crawling only indian sites.
want to know more, correct me if i am wrong
Guruji..will fold..matter of time. I don’t think they make a dime from their search or whatever they try do to make themselves solvent after the VC funding dries up. Google is pretty strong in India, unlike in other Asian countries. The obvious factor being that all educated ppl in India can read and write in english and there isn’t overwhelming content in indic languages that need a crawler or ranking algo – A good directory which is human-edited will suffice. The folks at Guruji seem to have brains but no strategy.
Ecommerce will someday boom in India, but we need lots of nice roads, trains, and companies like Fedex, UPS pushing their services. A ton of ppl work in banking, insurance and financial industries. Moreover these companies are opening tons of locations etc, so I don’t see how these industries will allocate the types of budgets that are being spent in international markets towards advertising on internet. I have a financial site with content pertaining to India. It gets about 200-300 vistors per day with 40 clicks. The average payout on CPC basis is an incredible 0.02 cents. Pathetic. In contrast, my US mortagge blog average about $80 cents. Long ways to go before many internet ventures in India become viable. The majority of internet ventures globally have business models that rely exclusively on ad revenue. And a whole lot of them have profitable business models..even though a lot of them are mom-and-pop ventures – companies with less than 5 employees.
In India for content, creativity, and participation from the wider users to explode, we need a robust advertising market. Not a paltry $300mil by 2009 on net advertising, according to the projections. Compare this to US advertising budget of $26billion, projected to grow at an incredible pace for the foreseeable future. I think the problem like with the lack of creative digital ad, marketing players. We don’t have no affiliate models, SEM metrics, conversion analytics etc. Pathetic. If this doesn’t improve in the very near future, the bubble will bust much faster with no room for energetic new ventures. Peace out. Lets discuss further.
its very slow .i tried searching for “TAJ MAHAL” in Guruji and Google at the same time . While i was able to scan through 10 pages for google image search guruji was stll loading the second page of its result . i am still waiting of ti to load the other page. I think it need some more work .
Wow .. the image search there is actually not bad at all. They have done a smart thing by putting some popular searches below the search box. I liked that when you are looking at one image, other thumbnails are displayed on the left sidebar. This is something missing in google search.
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Guru Ji wil soon fold up !
well…just dont compare google and guruji
i really dont think guruji people should be chasing google…search is quite versatile thing…they should try to apply it to some different stuff…local search/offline search/client specific…