GURUJI.COM and the reasons for its failure.

There is one name that existed for six years and vanished like it never did.

Guruji.com(2006 - 2012) - The Indian Search Engine.

Above is the screenshot of the last available archive of Guruji.com at Internet Archive(on 15 November, 2012).

What was Guruji?

Guruji.com is an Indian Internet search engine that is focused on providing better search results to Indian consumers, by leveraging proprietary algorithms and data in the Indian context.

- Wikipedia's opening line before shutdown

And

Guruji.com is an abandoned Indian Internet search engine that was focused on providing better search results to Indian consumers, by leveraging proprietary algorithms and data in the Indian context.

- Wikipedia's opening line after shutdown

What a perfect example of explaining tenses.

Along with searching webpages, Guruji later-on also added the feature of searching images, local services within cities, musics, cricket, movie timing and financial share markets.

Founders and Foundation

• Anurag Dod, CEO/Co-Founder | BTech IIT Delhi - I had found a CrunchBase page about him Anurag Dod - Founder & CEO @ Guruji
• Gaurav Mishra, COO/Co-Founder | BTech IIT Delhi & MS (Computer Science)Buffalo State College - Here is another from CrunchBase again Gaurav Mishra - Director, Product Management @ Yahoo!

Both Anurag and Gaurav founded the company by bagging the investment of 322 million INR (around 7 million USD in 2006) by Sequoia Capital India. Since the beginning Guruji focused to remain more desi and provide appropriate search results for Indian peoples. It was observed that search engine was receiving some very good part of the Internet traffic.

According to a study conducted by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), about 65 million people use search engines, with every user spending on an average 20 hours a week browsing the net for data and information, including news. The current market size for search engine advertising is pegged at $50 million (Rs.2.3 billion) annually.

Source - Local Search Engine, Guruji.com, Launched (when Guruji was just launched)

More at - Local Search Engine, Guruji.com, Launched – Tech2

Shutting Down

Guruji's shutdown was rather very sudden and undeclared. A really sad ending.

Guruji Search is Dead?

This article was published on 13 October, 2012 which reported that Guruji was retrieving no search results and prompting a 502 Bad Gateway error. Worse part -it was happening since last 5 days.

screenshot of 502 - Bad Gateway error (from mentioned article)

Article requested a humorous advice that probably all Indian would have requested in those days -

While we don’t know whether Guruji search is officially dead (have reached out to them for more details), but it’s very important for Guruji team to kill it gracefully (unless you want to give an impression that the team was out for vacation for more than 5 days and there isn’t any site monitoring team in place).

Source - Guruji Search is Dead?

Reasons and Circumstances

Since the beginning Guruji had some of the toughest competitors standing against them. Google, Bing, Yahoo search, Yandex etc. Other than this, first decade of 21st century was the time when internet era had just begun in India. Most of the home PCs used to have Google as their homepage. Moreover there were people who instead of typingwww.facebook.com in the URL bar used to search Google with 'Facebook' to get links of it's login page. So we could say that it Guruji's launch timing was not in its favour.

Away from this there was a mistake that Guruji did - Guruji.com launches music search engine. They launched a functionality of searching pirated music over the internet in 2008. They were using 'deep linking' method to search music over internet that other search engines like Baidu's (popular Chinese search engine) were already using, though it was illegal within many countries which were having proper cyber laws. In those days sites like SongsPK  (and similar) were getting high traffic, hence Guruji team thought that it would be a good idea another effective music search engine. And this is where they committed their mistake. They forgot that they were a big company now and they can be easily brought into High Court for doing any piracy acts (music search was one such act) and badluck for Guruji, it did happened. T-Series filed a lawsuit against Guruji for providing free pirated songs of T-Series.

In 2011, Music search was shut down - Guruji Shuts Music Search.

Later site development leaded with very slow pace. It was clear that company had lost its initial enthusiasm and was at its breaking point. At the same time Anurag Dod was working on his another company AdIQuity - A mobile advertising solution. This made it clear that Founders were ready to drop their desi startup and move on with some other practical ideas.

Here are some Internet Archives how it evolved and had a sad ending.

Oct 2006 (first beta release snapshot) - Sounds like tadaa!

 Nov 2007

June 2008 (Notice the 'new' Musics search facility available)

Oct 2009 (Their Music search was getting popular)

Oct 2011

Oct 2012 (Notice only Web and Image search services were provided just the before unexpected shut down)

And bam! It's all gone.

archive.org

Internet Archive too. Yeah! I am Archive's Wayback Machine fan. ;)

Though I would still say that Guruji was an ambitious project. Quitting their Silicon Valley jobs and starting an Indian Search Engine requires some real guts. I think it was all about timing, experience and decision that ruined Guruji. I still believe that there were some ways through which Guruji could have survived and been at a even better place than it was before in its golden days.

A post from quora .