Guruji enters blogosphere...

It was really getting lonely sitting in our Bangalore office, and trying hard to make our search engine better. To top it, we weren’t really talking to our friends for whom we were trying to make Guruji better in the first place. We wanted to talk to our users…We wanted to talk to you…We wanted to know what you thought of us…We knew we can get much better by just listening to you….We wanted to tell you what lies ahead….Yes, We had to start talking and listening….

And, start we did. Everything that we intend to do at Guruji would be centered around you - "the Indian Searcher” - and keeping this spirit in mind, here we are, with our (and that includes you too) own blog. The first edition of the blog brings you an interview with Anurag Dod (our CEO) where we quiz Anurag on Guruji – the origins, the reason for existence and his plans.

We also take you to Bangalore where we capture the launch event of Guruji.

If you are the curious type and are wondering how does guruji work, and how do we manage to get you those results, then this edition brings you a jargon free explanation. 

We are really looking at getting smart people like you to want to work with us, and we tell you about our open positions here – We are hiring.

We then take you to our first commercial where we tried to make the most of the princely sum of a few thousand rupees that our acting CFO (Gaurav) let us “experiment” with. Do let us know what you thought.

Since our launch, our support id (support@guruji.com) has been getting a steady stream of feedback mails from you – our users – and we thought we should compile a few of them and present to you. We thank our users for their sometimes-encouraging-sometimes-criticizing feedback.

We are really very excited to be able to connect with our users through the Guruji blog and we look forward to your participation. Comments, Criticisms, Suggestions, Compliments are all welcome. Please do let us know how we can together create a great Indian search engine. Thanks and keep exploring India through www.guruji.com

Comments

[Suhas]

Great beginning folks... Keep up the good work... And one question on your smart crawler, if it automatically crawls the web(similar to googlebot), it must have a start point, then move to other sites via hyperlinks(i presume), so what's going to happen to sites which have no links from other sites. You've got a different algorithm for that? Just curious... thanks.. and all the best

[Tejaswi]

@Suhas: I have no idea how Guruji's crawlers handle this. But personally, I can tell you that sites with no inlinks are typically not very important. If they are imporant, they will be linked, and if they are not important, they won't be linked. Now, to put it into perspective, if I ask you now for an example for one such site with no in-links, you will mention it here, and it'll have an in-link then. It's like trying to find the first uninteresting number, or some other paradox like that.

The more interesting problem is about how we deal with pages with no-outlinks. These are very common (pdf files, and other text documents that are informative, but have no outlinks). That problem, fortunately, doesn't affect crawling, but will affect ranking of sites. You can refer to various research papers on web results ranking to find out how they handle 'dangling nodes.'

[Aditya]

Hi,
There is a feedback button at the end of every search result page, where the user can rate the search results. CAn you please provide a field to write additional comments apart from just rating it bad....good...excellent. Once I have click on "RATE IT" take me to another page where I can enter additional comments.

Guruji should also index lyrics of english songs as Indian are listening to a lot of Western music. For eg. if I am searching for "waiting on the world to change" by John Mayer. I expect to see that as my first search result and the india specific content can show after that.

The goal I believe should be a search engine for Indians, what ever they indulge in and not just a India specific sites.

By broadening your scope you are more likely to appeal to the "Desi Searchers".

Good work! Keep it up.
Thanks
Aditya