The Hindu : Front Page : Guruji goes `desi'

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Sunday, Mar 11, 2007
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Guruji goes `desi'

Anand Parthasarathy

A boon to non-English-knowing users of Internet

Bangalore: Since November 2006, Guruji, the Internet search engine created by two graduates from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, has been `crawling' cyberspace, looking for web content of relevance to Indians. Now the resource (www.guruji.com) has gone `desi' adding three Indian languages to the original English resource.

Friday saw the launch of Hindi, Telugu and Kannada language searches — other languages are in the pipeline.

Co-founder Gaurav Mishra says 90 per cent of the queries handled by the search engine are local in nature — so it makes sense to help searchers ask the question in their own language. Local language content is going to be the Next Wave of Net services — and Guruji hopes to have an edge when it comes to riding the wave. The company received crucial funding from Sequoia Capital India, a leading venture capital fund; as well as from Suvir Sujan, who co-founded Bazee.com, India's largest online `mandi.' This allowed the promoters to create a `server farm' of nearly 50 computers to index and store all India-related content on the Web.

The Indian language search engine features the respective scripts as `virtual' keyboards on the screen — and it is quite simple to pick and place letters and words, with the mouse, to formulate a query in one's own language.

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