India is leading today in the terms of IT services it provides globally. It may be sometimes misleading to stereotype India as a outsourcing sector in the IT industry rather than a product maker. There may be a few products which Indian IT firms have managed to produce but these have caused significant changes in the market only to be taken over by the IT giants. India’s stride in the development zone might bring up some enthusiasm amongst Indian technicians who flock abroad for search of such oppurtunities.
The students of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) have now tied up thier seat belts to get prepared to carry on a big fight or maybe enter a race where its competitors have reached the brink of perfection. Guruji.com, India’s first search engine has gone live on October 12, 2006. Its primarily in its beta stage and proves to cater to the Indian audience which I feel is a nice take as trying to be global in the first step would have been slight dampening as its success would be straightway measured to the likes of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc. But taking on the Indian look Guruji provides a strict policy of bringing you the pages solely belonging to India. It even asks for feedback if you encountered a page which was not Indian. Guruji.com is backed by Sequoia Capital India (which eventually provided venture capital for Google, Yahoo!, Paypal, Electronic Arts, YouTube, Ometric, Insider Pages ) with a $7 million funding which seems very much encouraging for the efforts going to be put into making Guruji.com a big success.
I tried a rather hard comparision on this 14 day old Guruji to the 8 year old Google. The search key I chose was “diwali“. The results proved pretty interesting. Google’s Indian Pages searched 11, 60, 000 in 0.13 seconds while Guruji returned 2, 20, 239 results (time not mentioned, but was faster than Google’s) put into a ratio of about 5:1. Then I searched for “Infosys” in which google returned 3, 19, 00 pages in 0.2 sec while Guruji returned 1, 00, 645 pages put into a ratio of about 3:1.
Being a 14 day old search engine and bringing about 3:1 ratio results (almost similar in relevance) is a good news for the IIT students and Indians alike for such future innovations within the country. The thing to watch out for would be whether it would be able to attain success in the Indian market like Google.