Disclaimer: By writing this article, I, in no way mean to criticize Guruji.Com. This is just something I found interesting and therefore I am sharing.
With an emerging boom in Indian IT sector, they are now localizing internet services. Indian users rely and prefer their local services. Examples could be; Rediffmail, Shaadi, Sify, Naukri, Zapak, Indiatimes, and Guruji etc
Guruji.Com is a premier Indian search engine that vows to provide easy search facility to the Indian users. They have indeed simplified search; as they are offering Indians’ appealing services like Web Search, Images, City, Movie Timings, Music and Finance search. I think they are quite successful in attracting local traffic in a very less amount of time, and I believe their services are also worth checking.
If we have a look at Guruji.com’s About and FAQ page, they claim that their purpose is to showcase Indian content before the world. Therefore they only index “Indian” or “India Related” websites.
But wait a moment! You may also have noticed that when you try searching something, in the results you see Pakistani sites or we may say non Indian sites also. Surprised? Well you will be surprised even more when we analyze their Music search, as 30 to 40% search results show Pakistani sites. Don’t believe? See the screenshot below
Alright! For sake of argument, we can say Songs.PK or any other Pakistani Music site – (umm.. pirated music) could be India related site because they host Indian songs also. Similarly in the Web results, they say they show the Pakistani sites that may be having “India Related” content. But.. Not Really! See the screenshots:
In the above screenshot, I just entered a random keyword and hit upon that page. You see the search results?
Now who on the earth is gonna say that Pro-Pakistan.com or Baithak.Net is an Indian….. ah .. sorry.. “India related” site? In case you didn’t notice, in the screenshot, Baithak.Net clearly says “A place where Paki Bloggers get United”.
“Indian search engine indexing Pakistani content?” Actually it doesn’t sound odd to me; in fact I feel proud that India top search engine is relying on the content that is generated by the Pakistani users.
Now some of you may argue that what’s wrong even then? Their crawler may be indexing non-Indian sites by mistake! They remove non-Indian sites if we report. But it is not so.. they knowingly index Pakistani sites; in fact they partner with them. Have a look at the screenshot below
In the above screenshot, a Pakistani site shows ads by Guruji. Guruji’s AdGuru is a service like Google Adwords, where advertisers can advertise their products or services on Guruji’s network. But unlike Google, Guruji doesn’t offer Adsense-like publishers service. Then how did FunMaza.com and Songs.PK display Guruji ads? The mystery was solved by an Indian friend of mine who is also a publisher of Guruji Ads. She told me that Guruji offer publishers partnership to the selective webmasters on a high payout rate. They ask your data via email and then provide you with the html code to be inserted in your website.
At the end, I’ll say it again that I didn’t mean to criticize the great effort done by Guruji.Com, neither is it bad to crawl Pakistani sites by an Indian search engine, as Guruji.Com sends a decent amount of traffic on indexed sites. All I wanted to share was some interesting information I discovered about Guruji – So let’s shout out! Waah Guruji!