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A graduate in electrical engineering from IIT Delhi, a Masters degree in Computer Science from University of Michigan, employment in Silicon Valley—Anurag Dod was following the tried and tested route to success. When he joined Wisenut in U.S.A., a search engine for global markets, the time period (1999-2000) coincided with the rise in new media activity and got his attention.

Other global search engines, namely Google and Yahoo, were placing their products in the market place and Dod realized that people were adopting well to the new media. “By 2004-’05 I noticed that the Internet was not in the experimental stages anymore,” says Dod.

He also saw that there was nothing tailored for the budding Indian market, comprising 80-90 million Internet users and untapped sales. “Our expected growth is tremendous because we have a billion-plus population,” he says. “Over the next three to four years we should have 150-200 million subscribers, half-way to China which is our nearest competitor in terms of Internet subscribers [300-400 million],” claims Dod.

These numbers, coupled with his prior experience of working at a search engine, soon catapulted Dod into the entrepreneurial arena. The idea of developing a desi search engine started brewing in his mind followed by his own search for must-have VC funding while he was in the U.S. “Seed funding is still a challenge in the Indian eco-system,” explains Dod.

By 2006, he was back in India, ready to become the entrepreneur behind’s India’s first crawler-based search engine, developed completely in India and designed to make search simple for Indian users. Bengaluru-based Guruji.com, funded by Sequoia Capital [Series A, $7 million] today handles about 1.4 million searches per day. “Search behavior differs from one country to another,” explains Dod.  Therefore, a solution that understands the local Indian consumer was required, especially for Indian language searches typed in English.

For example, if the keyword is President, you’ll get results on the President of India and not the American President.  Moreover, Dod’s survey showed him that 80 percent of searches are wrongly spelt, especially for Indian language keywords. His engine therefore recognizes the phonetics behind user intent. “Search engines have to be smart enough to display the right results irrespective of typos,” he states.

Guruji.com was therefore a pioneer here as it launched a web search along with the local city search application. Dod further strengthened his venture’s USP in 2007 by subsequently launching the search capability in eight vernacular languages. Later that year he secured series B of funding, this time $8 million together from Sequoia Capital and Sandstone.

But Dod himself was not done searching. In July 2008, he launched a music search on the engine, given that Indian users spent a fair amount of time on entertainment related searches—be it music, wallpapers or movies. Guruji’s music search is a separate search vertical within the engine specifically for music, taking a user to all possible variants of a particular query, be it mp3 downloads or links. If statistics are anything to go by, then Dod’s desi search engine currently accounts for 5-6 percent of the Indian Internet population on the whole, according to the entrepreneur.

Though the first two years were spent in product development, Guruji has been growing at 25-30 percent year-on-year since 2008, after Dod monetized the site through two products: Ad Guru (similar to Google ads) and partnerships with publishers of content (other technology, entertainment, education and news sites), namely Ad Guru Content. Most of the growth has been organic through word of mouth and balance through regular promotional activities, which included online and offline marketing. The real challenge lay in reaching out to the Indian consumer.

“We needed to reach out in a cost-effective way,” he says. This translated to product trials from an existing user base. Like a savvy businessman he found his solution from competitors. Dod went to Google and Yahoo to advertise. His mission was achieved through a two-pronged strategy: Market Guruji and understand user behavior. This strategy pretty much helped him search for answers, literally. “We understood how users formulated queries, long or short,” explains Dod.

Additionally, Guruji was advertised on other high volume portals to generate user interest. These marketing initiatives were coupled with interesting ideas like contests with monetary prizes. However, a pressing challenge of these marketing initiatives was to make sure they were well reached. So the firm introduced a referral marketing system wherein if a user referred Guruji to another user he could accumulate points and increase chances of winning the contest.

Dod also discovered an interesting analysis on user behavior which he imbibed in the technology behind his search engine—streamlining it according to phonetic recognition of a query. “We saw that in a web search queries were short, an average of two or three words, but for music searches, the query length was much longer,” he explains. Another observation was that search keywords are often full of typos. Forty percent of web searches were misspelt, while for music searches wrongly spelt queries ran up to 60 percent.

“Ultimately it’s the ease of a product that attracts a user, so our search engine moves beyond the typos to understand the query,” states Dod. “The expectation of a user on a search engine always lies in getting right content.”

Looking ahead, the entrepreneur is sure his product will be search focused and not a portal. Given that product-based startups have a much longer gestation period, Dod wants to continue to maintain a sharp focus for the company by increasing user adoption in the current verticals and keeping this confined to metro cities.

Portal Power
Launch date: October 2006

Initial investment: $7 million [Series A, Sequoia Capital]

Series B of funding: $8 million [Sequoia and Sandstone]

Topline growth: 25-30 percent YoY since 2008

Break-even on investment: 2 years

Search verticals: Web, city, image, finance, music, movies

Searches per day: 1.4 million

Employee headcount: 65

©Entrepreneur April 2010

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Anurag Dod, content, entrepreneur, Guruji, Indian, intent, product, query, search engine, spell, startup