Reliance Entertainment, a part of the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group, is planning to launch at least eight new websites, including a jobs portal and a classifieds site, this year, reports LiveMint.

The company already owns an online gaming portal Zapak.com, a social networking site BigAdda.com and an online movie rental and download site BigFlicks.com.

Reliance Entertainment recently received $100 million (about Rs 400 crore) from celebrity investor George Soros who acquired 3 per cent stake in the company.

Guruji.com has been an India focused search engine for sometime now. They recently launched a mobile version for their site. We caught up with Anurag Dod, CEO and Founder of Guruji.com for a quick round of questions relating to the company and their search technology, among other things.

What is the story behind Guruji.com and what made you change the name from Terrawiz.com?

The story behind Guruji is really simple, we (Anurag and Gaurav ) were both working in the Silicon Valley in the US and were witnessing some disruptive innovations that were changing the way in which people use internet in their daily lives. The Internet space in India still seemed underserved, especially the search engine space. There was no Indian player that was tackling the problem with a complete technology solution. Given our experience in the search technology domain we felt confident that we could make a difference. We created a first prototype (Terrawiz was the prototype) taking into account certain peculiarities of the Indian search usage. We approached the Sequoia folks with the prototype, and they were impressed with our commitment, vision and ability to execute, and decided to back the venture. The name change came about as we wanted something that was catchy, easily communicable and represented the aspirations of the company as a search engine, and Guruji was the name that did that.

What are your plans for monetizating Guruji? Are you planning to launch something like Google AdWords?

The plan to monetize is to allow advertisers to target the consumers based on the keywords that are being searched for. This is a proven business model and we believe that it has tremendous potential in India as well. We believe for SEM to really take off in India, innovation will have to happen around the specific needs and constraints of the Indian advertisers. This is a huge opportunity area. We are creating our own advertising platform and have already started accepting advertisements.

Tell us something about your plan to enter into partnership with websites to power their search engine? How many websites have opted for Guruji to power their search engine? What kind of challenges do you face in getting more websites on board?

A few hundred websites have entered into partnership with Guruji.com to power their search. We have had a wonderful response from these partners and the value that Guruji.com provides to them has ensured that they stay with us, and also refer other sites. A large number of these websites have joined us through word of mouth. The challenges we face are different at different points of time. When we started, we faced brand awareness related challenges, which is not a big challenge anymore. Today most of our challenges stem from our endeavour to bring more and more value to our publishing partners, which works towards making us better everyday.

On an average, how many search queries do you get a month? What is the percentage of regional search queries? Also, could provide some idea about the break-up of search queries conducted in different regional languages?

We are a private company and we usually refrain from sharing these numbers. To give you some indicative numbers, we do have more than 10 million searches happening on Guruji every month, and we are growing at a very rapid pace. We are also seeing huge interest in our regional language search capabilities. When we started, most of the regional language searches were experimental and were driven by the novelty value but today we are seeing utility queries around news, travel, blogs, entertainment being conducted. This is good news. Regional language search is a long term bet and we remain very optimistic about it.

How is Guruji different from say Google showing search results from Indian web pages?

I would like to take this opportunity and clarify that Guruji results are not about Indian web pages alone (as in hosted in India, or with .co.in), it is about content that Indians would want to search. We consider global sites like wikipedia or BBC as much relevant as any other “Indian site”. It is not about whether a site is being published in India or talks about India, it is about whether the information on the site is relevant to the Indian users. Generic search queries around symptoms of diabetes or bringing up your child can be very well met with global site content.

Coming back to your question, our value lies in relevancy. We feel that with the approach that we are taking and the focus that we have we will improve the quality of results from an Indian consumer point of view. With the Indian web usage set to expand, we are well positioned to deliver better results in terms of what the Indian consumer is looking for. We are a technology focussed company and always innovating to identify the problems that exist and delivering results on them. We were the first to launch the city search results along with out web results much before any of the global players (including Google) figured that out. Similarly with respect to cricket scores being part of web search or movie timings another thing that we were the first to launch it was innovation coming out of Guruji. We will continue to innovate around the peculiarities of the Indian search usage habits.

What would be the critical mass for the success of Guruji? By when do you see the website reaching that stage?

I think critical mass can be measured around several dimensions like adoption, product maturity, advertisers’ interest and so on. I think we are moving in the right direction and are on our way to acquire enough critical mass to be considered a serious search player. We believe we would be a formidable player in the next 12-18 months. Looking at what we have achieved in a short span of time in terms of product and adoption, especially against a well established giant, is a think to be happy about. We also realize that this is just the beginning and there are lots of challenges and potential achievements that lie ahead, and we continue to work hard.

Apart from placing more focus on Indian content and search capabilities in regional languages, how is Guruji different from a Google, Yahoo! or Live search?

I think points you mentioned are crucial differences and lead to significant incremental value. As I said earlier, it’s not about focus on Indian content alone but it is about focus on Indian search usage – which translates into what they search on, the way they search, their expectations from search results and so on. There is lots that can be done around these pivots to create a better search experience. Search capabilities in regional languages would emerge as a significant challenge and opportunity in the next few years. The local language play hasn’t surfaced yet in the Indian Internet space. We believe, there would be loads of action around it in the years to come, and we surely aspire to be the frontrunner.

What is the rationale behind adding regional search capabilities when most Indian Internet users already speak English? By when do you plan to add more languages and cities?

We are adding more languages and cities, as we speak we will be adding 2-3 more languages in the next couple of months and also expanding to 5-6 cities. Internet we believe would emerge as a mass medium and regional language content would be a key driver for the same. If you look at the evolution of other media forms – TV, print, radio – regional content has been the key force. The Internet experience in Indian languages is an underserved segment, and we at Guruji.com are gearing up to tap this opportunity.

What is Guruji’s value proposition, since the content is currently being sourced from Infomedia? Also what’s your strategy to face Google Local and Google Business?

Guruji city search is not only about content alone. Given a certain search requirement, understanding the search intent and creating an intent-content match is where we create value. To give you an example, if one searches for “Hotels Bangalore”, how do we figure out what top 10 be displayed first within the hundreds of hotels in Bangalore. You apply this scenario to various categories, suburbs, cities and you will begin to appreciate the complexity. What if you are searching for “key maker” in your locality and there are none available there, how do you figure out which is the closest key maker in a near by locality. The beauty of search as an application is that there are potentially infinite scenarios in which your product can get used, and designing a generic solution that handles them is where Guruji.com adds value.

Infomedia is one of our partners and we are also augmenting and refining our data through other means. Competition only pushes us harder and we are OK with Google following it’s own path.

What are the challenges of maintaining a search engine?

The challenges are extreme, indexing millions of pages and making sure that the millions of searches get served with the right results is a complex computer science problem that we are solving every day. It requires solving lots of engineering and science problems and we have a team of dedicated computer scientists from IIT and IISc’s that are up to the task.

How has your business experience been different from that in Bay Area?

It has been different in many ways and yet the way we have run it has been very similar to what we have seen there. We were always fascinated by the bay area in the way that start ups take on the giants and how the teams believe they can make a difference and eventually a lot of them do. In India we faced a lot of scepticism since there are not many product companies that have done well. But we are standing tall and making sure that we are counted as a product company that delivered on a difficult mission. Most of the Indian internet companies have relied more on the home advantages of knowing the market and distribution channels, rather than taking on pure technology challenges. We believe we are treading a different path by taking on possibly the hardest technical challenge. Our “Chak De” spirit is keeping us going and we really believe we can tackle this and make a difference.

Going forward, what are the features that you would like to see implemented in Guruji?

We have lots of things in the pipeline to better the Indian Search Experience. You would soon see them taking shape, please stay tuned.

Almost everybody seems to compare Guruji with Baidu. But Baidu was launched in a country where the predominant language was Chinese and not English, the forte of Google, whereas Guruji has been launched in a country where the predominant language, at least for the internet users, is English and not say Hindi, Tamil or Gujarati. What’s your comment on that?

I think one rule does not apply to all. In India we feel that even in English a lot of search intents can be served in better ways. So the opportunity exists in creating a better search for the English users from a different point of view. It was only after we launched some of the things that the global players cared to implement them here in India. So the real difference is the focus and commitment which we have for the Indian consumer.

How do you plan to reach millions of mobile internet users? Have you started some talks with the mobile operators in this regard?

The Mobile Internet space is a very interesting area and is yet to be defined fully even in developed internet markets. We believe Mobile Internet would have its own peculiarities, and it would not be as simple as porting the computer web to the mobile device. It would take much more than that. And then if you bring the Indian perspective, the mobile internet space becomes even more peculiar. We are watching this space closely. You can check out Guruji mobile by logging onto http://www.guruji.com on your mobile phones. The mobile internet space excites us. Still early days but some good things are ahead of us.