I really do mean search me, I know these days dotcoms have a way of choosing names which mean little, this one, well even I was thrown. But…yes there is always a but :-), ByIndia makes sense when you vist their website, also for those of whom read my posts often, there was of course a hint in the title (Search Me). ByIndia searchs the web.
ByIndia is a search engine for everything Indian, (sounds familiar, yes Guruji is also doing this). Its homepage claims that it is the “most comprehensive Indian search on the web”, I actually hadn’t heard of this, even though its been around for 4 years. It currently indexes over 21 million webpages. The company behind this is Securenext, and in 2006 ByIndia was bought by Web2corp, a NASDAQ traded entity.
Okay enough of the corporate babble, does it do what it says on the box. Lets give it a go
Search term: Bollywood – I figured it was Indian
Google – Came up with wikipedia entry, and B4UTV, and bollywood.com
ByIndia – Bollywoodhello.com, cine-dreams.com
Now not being a bollywood fan (flame war NOT required :-)), not sure which of these is a better result, hence continuing my scientific analysis of the two search engines, I tried to enter in Mumbai
Google- Got wikipedia, and also guide to Mumbai
ByIndia – Mumbai jobs and Mumbai consulate
I would still bet on google. Note: I searched google as a whole NOT google.co.in, which may have narrowed it even more. This actually brings me to another question, What makes one search better than another? I mean How do we know what google gives us is good?
In addition to search ByIndia does everything else also, classifieds, blogs, auctions. These are not really searched, but allow you to create. Why does everyone have to do everything, just partner with each other.
Okay enough of the negative vibes (Quote from “Kelly’s Heros” for those who like movies), ByIndia have a great way of allowing people to type the search query using their own language character set. So you can use the punjabi, hindi character set. Unfortunately I don’t have these on my PC, so if anyone does please let me know how good it is. I think if ByIndia just did this, and became a dominant force, they could really have a awesome product.
Feelin_Tired 
Search India
A search engine for all things Indian, you can even type the query in your own language
byindia.com is just a huge hype and not even developed by them. they’ve just bought a collection of scripts and have integrated in to a website. nothing much interesting except the domain name. i dont know how you even tried to compare this with google which is a big insult.
example: their video sharing script is owned by http://www.alstrasoft.com/videoshare.htm
Have to say it’s a bit poor, but every search engine will get compared to google.
Tarun
This is not a search engine, why would I use this over google?
Saurav, I compared it google, because when I think search I think google. I agree its a bit poor, but there is nothing wrong in using opensource scripts, I think they should stay away from other things and just do the search part, especially the language part.
Has anyone tried that yet?
Iqbal
I am visiting this page rather late, so the reply might be out of the context, still two cents –
Steve Jobs once said “Desktop war is over, Microsoft won it long back.” In a very similar fashion, I think search engine war is over google one it long back.
Does that mean for 100 years Google will rule? The answer is – Probably, probably not “Google has won the war for the way the web is today, not sure about what happens in next 5 years ”
Apart from this – I genuinely wanted to use guruji once. They claim that “you should search guruji for indian movies/songs etc.” So, I go and search for “don”. Guruji did not even have this in the first page (atleast then). Now it comes in the first page, way below. I even sent them a feedback – “No acknowledgements!”
Search engine is not just about “crawling” and “indexing”. Read the google paper – infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
just shows the amount of thought that’s gone into making it.
I guess some of the Indian Search engines might come closer to where Google is “probably”, but thats not going to be anytime soon.
Hi Abhijit
Tks for coming by, I disagree on the desktop wars and also search engines, the way I see it is that the landscape user/mind changes with each new generation hence google may have been good a few years ago, but today alot of the results are simply due to the power of the $.
I think we are going full circle to user built databases, i.e the wikipedia type of things, with wikisearch etc. Just like yahoo was man made instead of robots way back.
As for guruji, I think they were doing better when they had no money 🙂
Iqbal
Hi,
That is precisely what I was saying 🙂 Google has won the war today, but that gives no guarantee that they’ll remain the king for ever (arguably they are smart and hungry, so won’t be easy for anyone to de-throne them) and if you disagree with Desktop wars “go and tell Steve Jobs!” 🙂
But you made a very good point -> “We are going full circle on user-built databases”. Infact, i’d be tempted to call it a spiral “we are on next level now than the catagory based directories towards folksonomy” and couldn’t agree with you more because we are ourselves building something thats tag-based.
-abhijit
ByIndia is doing marketing on Russia’s crack,serials,porn site. Their sites directly open byindia as popup. That’s why its alexa rank up.
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