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City’s answer to Google
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Infoaxe.com is similar to Google. But what makes the company special is that its founders hail from the city
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CREATING A BUZZ IN SILICON VALLEY Siddharth Jonathan and Vijay Krishnan
Both companies were founded by Computer Science graduate students at Stanford University, both companies operate in the same domain of Internet search; what’s more both companies also share the same mentors. Yes, the striking similarities betwe
en Infoaxe.com, the recently launched personal search engine and Internet super-power Google are many; there is one striking difference however, unlike the American / Russian origins of Google’s founders; both Infoaxe’s founders hail from Chennai.
Founded by Siddharth Jonathan, engineering graduate of SVCE Chennai in 2005 and Vijay Krishnan, graduate of IIT Mumbai and student of Don Bosco, Infoaxe.com acts like a personal web-search engine archiving the personal web-usage of a user such that it throws up more accurate relevant results. Jonathan tells us how it started, “While using the web for our own research, we were a little disappointed with the generic results a web search engine would throw up; early last year during our final year at Stanford, we embarked upon creating a search engine which would throw up results on the basis of a user’s web browsing history — the result was Infoaxe.”
When a user logs onto Infoaxe, he is prompted to download a toolbar which then keeps a track of the web-sites a user navigates through. The searches are then mapped to the user’s browsing history, as Jonathan explains, “Let’s assume a student is researching colleges and is browsing through classes taught by a certain professor named ‘John Smith’; if the student wished to re-visit the same pages 3 months later he might find it difficult as the search query ‘John Smith’ in a regular search engine would lead him to generic results.” He continues, “Infoaxe, on the other hand, would land the student exactly on the same page he was browsing earlier, more so the ‘pivot’ feature also gives the user the functionality of re-visiting all the web-pages he was browsing at that period of time.”
Understandably the site has already gained a lot of buzz in Silicon Valley with it securing investors of the ilk of Draper Fisher Juverston, Labrador Ventures, the same investors who’ve invested in companies such as Hotmail and Skype. On the team’s plans moving forward, Jonathan, a student of SBOA school, tells us, “We believe Infoaxe can compliment generic search engines like Google / Yahoo and become a default search destination when a user is searching for a slice of his personal web memory.” For now though, the youngsters from Chennai are happy building their product and competing with other start-ups in the tech hub that is the Silicon Valley. Early signs are extremely positive, but as they would admit the journey has only just begun.
SUDHIR SYAL
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