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Local Search is an International Phenomena
By: David Westbrook
The vastness of the Internet, with an estimated 200 billion pages, is nothing short of astounding. In fact, the reason that the number is an estimate is that no one search engine has indexed all of these pages.
The fact that search engines aren't yet able to index all the pages out there may not be a bad thing for people looking for goods and services locally. After all, who hasn't had the experience of going to the Internet in hopes of finding an item locally only to have a search engine spew back nothing but seemingly irrelevant results.
Not surprisingly, all three major search engines are attempting to sort this problem out. In addition, numerous smaller players are hoping to score big in the race to provide relevant local results. The reason? Revenue. There are big dollars in this market. In fact, in a recent study by Borrell Associates the estimated revenue from advertising for local search in the US was put at $1 billion dollars for 2006. For the year 2007, it is estimated that this number will grow by 86 percent to $1.8 billion dollars.
While the challenge in the United States may seem like a daunting one, it pales in comparison to the same challenge in India. Among other factors, India has a population of nearly 797 million more people than the US. A further complication for local search in India is that there are over one thousand languages, and twenty-four of these have a base of a million or more people who speak them. At the same time, with total annual revenues of only $50 million, the search engine advertising market in India is a small fraction of the same market in the United States.
In spite of the numerous challenges, an Indian based company ?Guruji? has recently launched the search engine Guruji.com. According to the company's website, "Guruji.com is the first crawler based search engine for India and India related content." The company has starter funds of $7 million dollars from the Indian based venture capitalist firm Sequoia Capital India.
Though the data held by Guruji is continuously growing it has started by focusing on Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Indore, Noida, Mysore, Ludhiana, Mangalore, Vadodara, which are among India?s cities with the most Internet penetration. Using a proprietary algorithm, Guruji.com will continue to crawl the web looking for India related content and then sorting it so that searchers get relevant results.
Find more information about local searching at http://www.localsitesfor.com |
