Where is India's Google?

By Ojas Sharma   |   Friday, 22 May 2009, 19:43 IST   |    26 Comments
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Where is India's Google?
Bangalore: Though India is hailed as a technology hub, when it comes to search engines, it is yet to churn out its own Google; a search engine, which will be India centric and will cater to the Indian market. Apart from Guruji.com, no search engines do a web search in India. All other search engines are like web directories. "Indian search engine war has just begun. I think Indian Google is in the making. We are trying to replicate like what Baidu has done in China," says Anurag Dod, CEO & Co-Founder, Guruji.com. Baidu is a search engine designed to cater the Chinese market. It has been successful in diverting the traffic from Google to its own search engine. Indian search engines would like to replicate the same success. Microsoft and Yahoo have been investing a lot in search engines to compete with Google. So in this race, can any Indian search engine topple over Google? Even in India, Google tops the list of search engines but when it comes to search related to India there are many loopholes. Realizing this opportunity, many entrepreneurs in India plunged in, to start a search engine. But most of these search engines now remain as web directories. "We searched for information on India and couldn't find it. That's why we decided to launch Indian search engine. Not everyone has website, so we put such companies' information on the Internet," says Shri Ram, Co-Founder of AskLaila.com. Addressing the challenges, Namita Kashyap, Chief Operating Officer of Megrisoft, which owns search engines like 123khoj.com, indiabook.com and indiansearchengine.com says, "We have the brains and the technology to topple over Google but what we don't have is good infrastructure." Guruji.com has database in U.S. and its CEO, Dod says that Infrastructure is a big problem. "Main bandwidth cost is 4-5 times more expensive in India." Apart from the infrastructure, Indian search engines face many other problems as well. Web is growing very fast and many websites are updated daily. Big search engines use crawler technology to keep themselves updated. Crawler browses the World Wide Web in an automated manner. But Indian search engines, due to the lack of technology expertise and higher cost are forced to adopt lesser efficient technology. "We don't use Crawler to keep our websites updated. We also don't use Page Ranking technology. We have human power search where information is submitted by users and editorial team and according to its important we rank the page," says Bharanidharan Vishwanathan, CEO and Co-Founder of Antya.com. AskLaila uses a 'keep alive process' where they keep on scanning on what is happening in all cities. They have a database team that updates the search engine regularly. Another big challenge that all Indian search engines have is brand awareness. Not many know that something like AskLaila.com or Guruji.com exist. Google is synonymous to 'search' when it comes to the mass. "It is a challenging task because Google has been here for 10 years. We want to bring out a much better Indian search engine. We are doing a creative campaign but have a long way to go," says Dod. However, amidst all these challenges, many search engines have sprouted in India and competition has grown a lot. Apart from Google and other big international search engines, there are Indian search engines like guruji.com, antya.com, asklaila.com and 123khoj.com, who are trying to lead the flock. "If search engine focus on problems that are not solved by the major players then they can survive. We have created a market for ourselves by making a business search engine that gives local information," says Shri Ram. This is exactly what Indian search engines should do to be a Google in India. To know more about such innovative companies click here, https://www.siliconindia.com/startupcity_09/index.php