Has Guruji Found it’s Mojo?
One of the earliest post of pluGGd.in was whether India needs a National Search Engine – and my argument 
was whether India focused search engine is really relevant and can it compete with Google/Yahoo of the world?
Guruji, one of the earliest India focused search engine after trying out several products seems to have found it’s mojo – in its music search product (T-series sued them for this).
In terms of traffic, Guruji shows an impressive growth curve – though they seem to be investing heavily on Google adwords, the traffic has seen sustenance over a period of time (1.7mn UUs/20mn total visits in Feb’09)
guruji traffic - fat lady is singing
Guruji’s ad network has bagged advertisers like eBay, MMT, Apnaloan etc – but I am not at all sure how many publishers use Guruji (what’s the compelling case to switch from Google to Guruji?)
All said and done, do you think Guruji’s music search will keep the boat afloat? What’s your opinion?
Ashish, talking about music search – just discovered this site, http://www.phulki.com – really nice interfact that could possibly give Guruji a run for their money..
Oh yeah: we profiled them when they launched : http://www.pluggd.in/online-music-discovery/meta-aggregator-indian-music-sites-phulki-1984/
Yeah.. But, its difficult to justify the funding for this…
(Disclaimer: This rant does not discount all the hard work put in by Guruji’s team. They’re stellar, able and backed by seasoned people).
I could seldom find a reason to switch to Guruji, more than that, it was google which rescued me when I was looking for specifics in India.
Moreover, I seriously suspect that their algorithms gives higher weights to pages containing Indian content.
Here’s a most glaring example:
1. Type Katrina on Google (a) on “Pages from India” every result is of the bollywood lass. (b) on “the pages from Web” only one result is about Hurricane Katrina
2. Now, try the same on Guruji. You would expect that it would mimic Google or do better for “Pages from India”. Try it out. The first result is from Hurricane Katrina.
Amma yaar, agar Katrina ko upar nahee dikha paye to ab baaki kya bacha!!
Jokes apart, IMO, any search engine which wants to outdo Google has to stop thinking like Google and stay away from Google’s facets/paradigms/indentation/metaphor/UI design of it’s SERPs.
Would love to dive more here or on twitter @1ndus
Pretty pertinent test for an search engine that has Indianess as its distinguishing point. Maybe like a traditional guru, it is discounting references to a heroine over that of a hurricane:) On a more serious note, got to know of another search engine, http://www.yauba.co.in/, which gave promising results. Guess you can put this to the test and tell the community if this is any good. Did a simple test,( go here http://eklavyatechnologies.blogspot.com/search/label/Web%202.0) and found search results to be accurate.
Phulki is great !!! I use it regularly .. and imaging that we are discussing Phulki on the post meant to be abt Guruji … we rest our case ….
I too use Phulki a lot. Its a cool website with very neat user interface. Also it has many more features than Guruji.
Phulki is the Indian version of ‘RADIO.BLOG.CLUB’ @ http://radioblogclub.com
Only thing is they’ll have to look out on copyright issues, as RBC was blocked for the same. Lets see.
Here is another music search engine http://www.sanidapa.com, which crawls thrid party music web sites and display the search results. You can search and play the songs in English, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Assamese and more languages.
Its a good site for music lovers.
Have a great time.
It’s its, not it’s.