(12 October 2006 9:00 pm)

BANGALORE: Using crawl search technology, two Indian technology aspirants Anurag Dod and Gaurav Mishra have launched an India specific search engine Guruji.com. The duo claims that their 40 US located servers have a data base of around 30 million India specific pages which he informs will double over the next few months.

During a press conference in Bangalore, Dod said, “What sets us apart is our focus on the Indian market and the Indian consumer. When an Indian consumer types in search a keyword like ‘newspaper’, the results would show him websites of the top Indian newspapers rather than site not relevant to him.” According to data available with Guruji.com, 90% of the internet queries are local in nature. Further, around 30% of the internet users on India spend 20 hours per week on the internet and after e-mail, search is the largest second use.

Guruji.com plans to create awareness about their search engine by events at colleges and through public relations. A budget of Rs 10 million has been earmarked for spends in 20 major Indian cities over the next five to six months.