Guruji.com vs Google : First Impression
Guruji.com a new search engine from India, is challenging Google in bringing better results for local search. Guruji.com is attempting to bring much better and relevant search results than popular search engines like Google and Yahoo for local search in India, much like what baidu is doing for China. Google does not offer Local Search in India, YET. So Guruji.com is attempting to fill that gap along with providing better search results for Indian content.
Sounds quite interesting. Isn't it? I just gave it a try to see whether Guruji can beat Google and pull out better search results. After trying a few searches particularly in Bangalore, I am quite impressed.
About the name:
Brute force translation means 'Dear/Respected Teacher'. In vernacular however, it means a person of knowledge and/or wisdom. I don't know how they came up with this name. But it is quite catchy and easy to remember. However, it does not directly mean anything related to search as such. But who knows, if it clicks, we might make Guruji synonymous with search, like Google. On the fun part, Knowing the meaning I can not use it as a verb like say I guruji it, just like 'google it'.
About the Search:
I tried looking for pizzahut in bangalore. Have a look at the snapshot. There are two key differences.
- The top portion of the results page, 'City Results from Guruji' is actually pulling out results like an Yellow book offering address and phone numbers of pizza hut.
- The later portion of the results is generic web search for the keywords. Again in the web search, it seems Guruji.com is pulling out results from domains which are primarily Indian rather than general search on the whole world wide web. That means, better and intuitive local results than popular search engines, say Google.
The localized search is quite evident if we search for a generic keyword. So I tried Pizzahut at Guruji.com. And here is the result. The page impressed me by pulling out the Pizza hut's India website at the top, folllowed by results from webpages by Indians.
If you just want Yellow pages results, you can try City search. Click on City above the search box. And then enter keywords. I tried 'Pizza hut in Bangalore'. The pages showed all Pizzahut locations in bangalore. Thatz exactly I wanted.
Another impressive feat is when I search for a general keyword like 'blog', it pulls out the information about Indian blogs, even though they are hosted on sites like google's blogger(blogspot). This is quite useful and intuitive. Try searching for blog in Guruji.com. You can see for yourself.
One thing I wanted to see included in the search results is a link to a map showing the location of the business. Since number in street address alone does not make much sense in India for navigation, it would be wonderful to show the results in a map with reference to a well known landmark in the map. This is how we find an address in India right? First find a well know landmark, and go from there. That would be a killer.
Comments
its realy indigenous.
It's very good! try this.
But its surprising that many indian websites are not regularly crawled by them. My website is one of them.
Sourav Mukherjee
http://www.travel-monitor.com
- Viju
http://vkarkala.googlepages.com/
Going forward expecting a tough fight to google.
Quite helpful for indian contents.
http://www.referencedesigner.com/googleguruji/
The clustering of search results are very cool!
For my point of view, Guruji.com has the strength of local search in Indian Languages. And full marks for them. but google is also striving for same.
They need to be innovative to keep their score up.
Regards
Rashmi Arora
http://www.indiatourismhub.com