Indian Search Engine Business Models - guruji.com

Staring this week, I specifically started looking at various indian web sites to determine how they are building up their business models. I started off with search engines, looked around some e-commerce sites, looked at some real -estate sites, a number of community sites. A first glance told me that it is not a simple job so decided to pick up one vertical at a time. This week I will spend time on search engines.

A. guruji : This banaglore based startup is really making waves in the local indian search engine. It has got strong VC funding and is all set to take on giants like google, yahoo and msn in domestic arena.











Key features:
1. Multilingual search
2. Local search - search by city, area etc
3. search movies in different theaters
4. search and play music through streaming for free (Awesome feature!!). A perfect product stickiness feature :)
5. Sponsored local listing comes up as part of search
6. Has browser plugin to capture more customers
7. The search plug-in embedded into a number of indian web sites

Business Model: Looking at the web site I guess the following may be supported:

1. CPC: Cost per click model for sponsored ads
2. revenue sharing probably with other partners (Not too sure but music content sites joining hands definitely involves some changing hands in terms of revenue! Will dig deep later)