Guruji - The Indian Search Engine was launched today. Backed by Sequoia Capital India, this one looks to be a real big launch.

It has kind of a minimalist googley feel to it. The search results are still a little raw, but one would expect that to improve with time.

The intention, they say , is to create a search engine which returns Indian results only. Their proprietary search crawlers judge whether a site is Indian or not and then decides to include or exclude that site from the index. Interesting!

I did a few test searches :
# "yahoo" returned mail.yahoo.com as the #1 result

# "google" returned google.co.in as #1

# "youtube" returned a blog from bloggersblog.com as #1 followed by 3 .info spammy looking results

# "wikipedia" returned kn.wikipedia.org (Kannada edition) at #1, and curiously enough de.wikipedia.org (German edition) at #3.

# "orkut" returned a blog as #1 - no orkut.com till #10


I'm a little confused. What exactly is Indian in those results? Indian is too vague a concept. Youtube, Wikipedia, and Orkut are very popular with Indian surfers and do have a lot of Indian content. Why then, weren't they indexed?

This is the real clincher - Check what you get when you search for guruji.

Bottomline : Site does have potential, but many issues need to be urgently ironed out.