My exams are finished now and that’s one reason why I was ‘missing’ from the blog since last one month. So when I was returning from my university after my last exam today, I saw the advertisement of this internet company called myquest.in. It was a new name and a new search engine which is only focusing on New Delhi NCR at the moment. The home page is not simple (unlike google or guruji) and it seems inspired from yahoo as it displays local weather, local events with live cricket scores and a list of top searches. A neat box which displays categories might assist you in getting the information you seek easily. It all sounds good because google is too international and a need for solid local search engine is sometimes desperately needed. We have seen some local search engines who are focusing only on India and thus the results on these sites are sometimes more relevant and useful than you get on google or yahoo. And it is needless to say that it also saves your PC time which you might use on doing other important things on computer.

The only trouble for myquest is that there are already some sites who have been going local since some time back and thus they are more likely to win in the race to become India’s Google. Guruji is a complete copycat of Google and it has some serious backing in the form of venture capital from Sequoia Capital. Sulekha is another website which focuses on Indians around the world and the site does a good job in local searches. But the question remains how myquest is better than the two sites I mentioned just now. I tried to search with some common keywords across the three sites to see the number of results they yield for you.

Sulekha is a site which owes a lot to its users (a significant American Indian population) for the content on the site and thus its reach is huge in India and U.S.A. while venture funding from Norwest Venture Partners also helped. The real competition for myquest would be guruji because both of them have to take things in their hand . The kind of results that myquest provided (see the box) against guruji are certainly worth an applause considering that it has just started. I do have problem with the user interface of the myquest mainly because the user interace on guruji is smoother. I also felt problem with the loading of myquest last night but I do think that the new kid has the meat to take on guruji. Somebody get the news to some venture capitalist please.