Well this is what I received regarding Guruji.com in the morning from a close and not-so-net-savvy friend of mine:
“Hi,
Heard the latest news? India has stopped googling for music and has started using the the No. 1 music search engine instead -www.guruji.com. It’s the only website where you can get all Indian music from 1932 to 2009.
Join the gang, stop googling for music. Search Music and Get Music MP3 downloads on Guruji.com. Try it, for music it clearly beats google and all other music sites hands down.
Good site to try it once for music.
Pass this mail to your friends as well.
Enjoy…
”
And I thought wow, wow, wow. Wait a minute. Is music still on the top of our minds? Or is it only the free stuff that we are interested in? Aren’t we all supposed to kill piracy and stop searching for illegal free music, bit torrent and p2p stuff?
Well whatever happened to integrity, Guruji too interestingly shows the same message quite prominently on their home page: “Thank you for making us No.1 in Music Search!, (As per independent third party research)”.
While the top destination site from Guruji does seem to be a Pakistani music site but as per data from Compete.com the traffic curve of Guruji has been on a decline since May, 2009.
Does anyone care to explain this? Who initiated this email fission? Sounds fishy, does it?
The language of the mail itself tells that it has been initiated by some Guruji staffer or PR firm!
The idea behind Guruji was to give India centric search and search in Indian languages but now Google and Yahoo also do that so obviously this is only vertical where Guruji can claim any kind of activity!
The mail does not seem to be genuine, Guruji somehow has not been able to pickup like the local search engines like Naver or Baidu.
Even I believe so Saurabh. But I liked the Guruji search strategy per se… it’s a gargantuan effort to reach the level they have in past. Why to spoil such a splendor into a blunder? We should ruminate about it.
I like guruji.com otherwise…:)
Entertaining email
, Guruji.com strategy of focussing on vertical search (music) seems to be interesting one. Whatever we might say music search download still is a good chunk of traffic, and presenting search results in an usable form (download, listen, ringtone etc) is much better than what you would get from plain google listing which you have to figure out on your own. Interestingly, Google launched music discovery service yesterday giving due importance to this vertical search. Take a look at http://www.google.com/landing/music/
One tip for Guruji for monetization, give a link to buy original song from itune or some other music store as well.
Earlier also I sawn similar posts talking against Guruji on pluggd.in. I never heard of guruji before so I visited site to konwo about it. Same holds true for no of my friends. Such strong nagative post, develop reader’s interest to visit site. (‘nam’ ya ‘badnam’ you have ‘nam’) Is it a marketing compaign by pluggd.in for Guruji?
Yes. With the amount of people that have departed (15 top engineering talent in the last 6 months), they better stick to one vertical instead of trying to be the entry-point to the web for all indians. I am sure the investors are asking serious questions of the management for this ensuing debacle