Guruji.com Introduces Ringtone Search – We Spoke To Anurag Dod, CEO – On Future Plans

Guruji.com has been launching search verticals since quite sometime now. So they have ventured into finance, music, movie tickets earlier and now its the time for ringtones. Given the huge number of mobile penetration in India this might be a really good service. Guruji also has a search algorithm which they claim can comprehend the user intent; handle attached or detached versions of a word; understand phonetic variations as well as capture more advanced variations of a word which are not captured through the phonetic approach.

Also as Guruji.com is available on mobile as well this search can be done right from your mobile phone and the ringtone can be downloaded directly to the phone.

We spoke to Anurag Dod, CEO of Guruji.com to know more about Guruji’s plans:

Q.1) Guruji has been in the news for its music aggregator. Can you share this story with us?

• First and only music search engine in India where users can listen to music, search for MP3 music and ringtones.
• Users can search for music through a song name or a movie name, as well as by the names of the actors, singers and composers.
• Users can search over 1 million songs.
• Our search algorithm has tolerance for spell errors/variations across almost all Indian languages/dialects.
• The smart technology behind Guruji Music and Rigntone search -

1. Coverage: Intelligent Mining of Music related content across the Web. Users can search for over 1 mil songs. Have mined the web for metadata information on over 1 million songs. Actors, singers, composers etc. – across 20+ languages E.g. given a song (Haule Haule) from a movie (Rab ne Bana di Jodi), we can quickly infer the details on – actor, actress, singers, composers, directors, language, year of release, etc.
2. Smart Query Interpretation: Understand the intent no matter how its expressed and in which language.
3. Phonetic Stemming: Understands various phonetic variations of a word to enhance search results (E.g. Kamine, Kaminey, Kaminay, Kamineyy, Kaminnayy, Khamineyy etc.)
4. Hybrid Stemmer: Captures more advanced variations not captured through the phonetic approach. Currently supports 1 lakh+ variations (E.g. Mohd, Mohammad, Muhammed)
5. N-gram support: Handles attached / detached versions of a word. A common thing when Indian languages are written in the English script (E.g. jaiveeru = jai veeru, Tumbin=tum bin)
6. Ranking: Relevant ranking algorithm with high degree of recall precision
7. Precise ranking based on several static (query independent) and dynamic (query dependent) parameters.

Q.2) Do you have any media plans to advertise the music aggregator?

• Yes, and we have seen tremendous growth and adoption of music search.
• We’ve used search ads, display ads and email campaigns online.
• What’s worked the best is innovative and interesting online contests, referral programs and virals.

Q.3) What is the breakup of users on Guruji.com for local search, music,
finance and movie timings?

• Can’t share exact numbers. But, at this point of time our leading search products are Web, Music and Finance.

Q.4) Are you planning on any new vertical in the coming years?

• We are exploring potential verticals, but have not finalized anything that we want to talk about. Lot of interesting verticals that could cater to the search needs of Indians – like travel, education and so on…

Q.5) Why hasn’t the local search industry in India picked up the way China has with Baidu.com?

• Because unlike US and China, firstly very little content on local search is available online, so the Indian model is more about putting together a database and then making it searchable. Indians are more comfortable calling in to get local information.
• Very few online – just over 40 million compared to 300 million on mobile.
• Local search will pick up on the web, but will take time.

Q.6) You launched the mobile search application way back in Feb. 2008. Any success in this space?

• We are seeing some great success with our innovative search products on mobile – cricket score search and ringtone search. These products are great examples of ease of access for fun, interesting information that a user wants right now.

Q.7) Guruji.com has been positioned as “India’s local search engine”. Has this strategy worked for you?

• Guruji has been positioned as an “Indian search engine” NOT as “Indian local search engine”. We want to be the preferred search engine for Indian users, that’s where “Indian search engine” comes into play. We understand the needs to an Indian user be it cricket, music or finance and our products deliver on the promise of “Indian search engine” and the position has worked.