Guruji.com

» see guruji.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

some search engines only make sense inside one country, and guruji was one of them. it was built for india, in and around bengaluru, to handle the languages and the local web that google in 2006 still treated as an afterthought. from ankara i had no reason to ever type its name. for me search meant google and, before that, the turkish directories i grew out of quickly. guruji belonged to a different internet with its own gravity.

the founders were anurag dod and gaurav mishra, two iit delhi graduates, and the money came from serious backers, sequoia capital and sandstone capital, the same kind of names that fund the companies you do end up hearing about. guruji grew fast on the strength of one feature above all, music search, which crawled the web for bollywood songs and let you play them straight from the results. for a country hungry for its own film music online, that was the killer function.

it was also the thing that killed it. a lot of those songs sat on sites hosting them illegally, and the label t-series filed a criminal complaint. the ceo was arrested on copyright charges, and the question of whether a search engine is responsible for what it points at, still unsettled in india at the time, landed hard on guruji. the music search closed in 2011, framed as a business decision with the lawsuit hanging over it, and the company itself was gone by 2012.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the actual end ~

guruji did not lose to a better search engine, it lost to a legal gray zone it had walked straight into. pointing users at pirated music was the feature and the crime at once. an american company with the same idea might have fought it out for years with lawyers, but the indian rules on intermediary liability were still being written, and guruji became one of the cases that helped write them.

~ the long tail ~

the failure got studied more than the product ever did. law students in india now read guruji as an early example of the mess around who is liable when a link leads somewhere it should not. google went on to dominate indian search anyway, in the local languages guruji had bet on being able to serve first. the head start was real, and it turned out not to matter.

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