Sequoia Capital, the venture capital backer of search engine Google, has pumped $7 million into a search engine focused on India.
It is called Guruji, and is being run by two returnees from Silicon Valley, Anurag Dod and Gaurav Mishra. It wants to provide better results for Indian searchers, it says by providing more local context and producing other proprietary algorithms, it said. Read more details here.
As mentioned before, Sequoia has invested in a number of competitors to Google, including Qihoo in China. As also noted, Sequoia has drastically reduced its ownership of Google shares over the past year, so that the conflict has minimized — although Sequoia’s Michael Moritz still sits on the Google board.
5 Comments
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Madhur Khandelwal said:
Can guruji.com become the Baidu of India? I have some thoughts about this on my blog at http://ileher.com/2006/10/12/gurujicom-baidu-of-india/
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Editor said:
Liked your piece Madhur. Good points
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Mihir Sambhus said:
Guruji has indeed made a big splash given its huge venture backing even though there were a couple of other sites in India : byindia.com, hotsamosa.com.
There will be very unique challenges in the Indian market though given the dynamics of the country. I have put up my thoughts on my blog at http://www.desihub.com/blogs/page/mihir/?anchor=desi_search_guruji_engine_gets
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krish said:
I wish Guruji all success. If they have any shortcomings they’ll improve, let’s hope. One point - it takes a lot of hard work and dough down the drain to excel an original whoever that is Google or Alta Vista or those who went before it. India is a multi-language, multi-cultural mosaic, no way Baidu is a comparison here. Guruji will have a lot of miles to walk and too many languages to speak. But I am sure, the founders and the VCs should have factored it in.
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Madhur Khandelwal said:
There has been a lot of discussion on blogosphere about Guruji.com because Search is hot and they are well funded by Sequoia and have a smart team on board. However I think people are going too far in saying that it will replace Google in India and such. This article clarifies how Guruji.com is different from Google and how it could differentiate its position in the search engine market in India.
http://ileher.com/2006/10/22/more-on-gurujicom-web-search-or-local-search/
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[...] New search engine, Guruji, has chance in mobile and local languages — One analyst questions whether the new search engine in India, Guruji, backed by Sequoia, really has a chance to succeed like Baidu did in China, because Google and Yahoo are already so dominant. See our wire story here on Sequoia’s investment. (If you are not getting VentureBeat’s wire stories, remember, you can subscribe to them separately via the RSS on the left side of the homepage, or you can just go read the wire on the left of homepage). Tagged Cisco, google, metrofi, YouTube, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen VentureBeat Community [...]