With India emerging as a highly competitive Internet market, more and more people are turning towards the Internet. At last count, there are reportedly 10.21 million active internet users in the top 7 metros alone, with Mumbai alone having 2.6 million !

With such statistics, it had to be just a matter of time that India had its own search engines leaning towards Indian content. The search engine business involves millions of dollars, and according to Ashok, many search engines have popped up over the years.

1. Guruji
Guruji Search can be described in one word - fast. The search results are thrown up pretty darn quickly with all the search results pointing towards note worthy Indian sites. For example, a search for technology came up with a result that include the IIT websites, Wipro and many more Indian sites. They are clearly intent on making India proud. All in all, a very good search engine.

2. ByIndia
ByIndia is a relatively good search engine, but has miles to go before it can succeed. For one, it does not give us any suggestions. That would mean if you made a typo,
then you would still get some absurd search results. I did a search for government and the results were disappointing. Also, its not very pleasing on the eyes.

3. Raftaar
A completely Hindi search engine, it provides user results that are clearly from India. An excellent search engine for finding results in Hindi.
(I couldn’t review it much cause I can barely understand Hindi :P )

4. T6 Personalized Search
T6 Labs is a R&D lab which is into higher order tensor analysis to solve variety of industry related problems. They claim that their search technology can recognise the personality of a user and automatically align the results according to his or her interest. Still in Beta, T6 Personalized Search still has a long way to go before it can come into the mainstream.

5. Search India
Search India is very much biased towards Indian results and provides a good range of results. However, this has to be possibly the worst looking search engine ! Its very unpleasing and very Web 1.0 .

6. 123 India
123 India is a standard search engine featuring results from India. It too is very chaotic in its search results. There is hardly a line gap between search results which makes it very difficult to read.

Update (12/1/07): Ashish Sinha has reviewed some Indian Search Engines as well. Check it out.