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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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.
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.
On a related note, Google announces co-op search http://www.google.com/coop/ .Now anyone can build their own customized Search engine .
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.
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/