[Reader-list] India's First Search Engine

[Kiran Jonnalagadda]

I think the more interesting bit is, when they describe something as  
"Indian so and so", exactly what does "Indian" mean here?

The most typical use is when some site claims to be a replica of a  
more famous site "for the Indian community", which begs the question:  
is India a community?

Usually, not. The typical Indian doesn't go online to meet other  
Indians. They are likelier to go looking for like-minded people under  
more specific categorisation, like people who are in the same  
profession as them, have similar political views, similar ethnic  
background, or otherwise. "India" is too broad to appeal here. A site  
may as well serve all Internet users worldwide but figure out how to  
present a personalised view to each user depending on what they are  
likely to be interested in.

India does become a valid community in the context of a matrimonial  
site owing to the peculiarities of this tradition, but regional  
communities are even stronger, accounting for the spate of regional  
matrimonial sites, and the clear categorisation in pan-India sites.  
Here it is a tussle between community identity and brand recall.

On the other hand, when a site like 70mm seeks to replicate NetFlix  
in "India", they are referring to the geographical and legal region  
of India. This too is a valid category. The dynamics of distributing  
movies from India to India is very different from distribution from  
India to Pakistan, Bangladesh or Sri Lanka (or from NetFlix in the US  
to customers in India).

Summary: making an India-specific site for reason of the dynamics of  
doing business in India is good, while being India-specific because  
you think your users will want to restrict themselves to that is bad.

Witness how there are several successful examples of e-commerce sites  
in India, while practically none of search engines or social  
networking sites.

At the moment, neither Raftaar nor Guruji appear to have any edge  
over Google. Their results may be more relevant, but that is not  
sufficient. They don't do worldwide searches, so one still has to use  
Google for that, and when India-specific results are needed, it's  
easier to check the box in Google than to remember to use a wholly  
different website with a new UI (the pages may appear similar, but UI  
is more than just appearance).

Raftaar's USP is that they can read and index pages that use an  
encoding scheme other than Unicode. This is valid, but not sufficient  
to give them traction, and will only work while there's a  
sufficiently large userbase for such sites, and only until Google  
implements the same. In other words, it's a dead end street.

Kiran


On 13/Oct/2006, at 7:21 PM, Anamika Bhatnagar wrote:

>
> Hi
>
> Even I tend to agree with Tapas. We need to be careful with the  
> words we use...I see nothing wrong in having an Indian search  
> engine. Agreed there may be marketing stunts involved and the fact  
> that both the founders are from IIT and want to use it for  
> branding...I see nothing wrong in it...why call it an IIT publicity  
> stunt?!
>
> It is not even on their front page...of guruju.com staring into our  
> eyes saying it has been made by two IITians. It is there in their  
> biographies. If they don't put it there, where will they put it?
>
> anamika.
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Kiran Jonnalagadda
http://jace.seacrow.com/