Long before Google realised that Indians needed a local search engine, two IIT Delhi graduates had filled the vacuum. Anurag Dod and Gaurav Mishra co-created and launched Guruji.com in October last year, enabling Indian users to find information in regional languages on city-specific topics.

“Guruji.com was conceived out of necessity. It was becoming difficult to search for India-related content on generic search engines,” says Dod, CEO of the site. The 10-month-old website provides data in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada, and has been used for over 15 million queries

“We are seeing a huge growth in India-related content, both in English and local languages. This requires a more focused search engine, which is customised and understands the Indian search intents better,” explains Dod.

Unlike other search engines that just sift through the information present on the Internet, Guruji.com goes a step further. “It combines the off-line data like yellow pages and classifieds along with the online data sources. So if a user is looking for phone numbers and addresses of ‘AC repair services in Bangalore’, he may not find the information online but will still get the results,” he adds.

In keeping with the trend, Rubru.in has started online yellow pages, which carry information only on Delhi and the NCR region. Last month, Google too announced that it would start a local search that would display local businesses in the city and allow companies to list themselves for free.