Guruji.com shuts down its sweet spot ‘music search’ – is Guruji dying ?

India focussed search engine Guruji.com is losing its momentum. Yes, Guruji has shut down one of its sweet spot – the ‘music search’. Touted as the only local search engine, Guruji shot to fame immediately after its launch and Sequoia Capital invested $7 million in this startup and thus betting on the need for purely local search engines.

Guruji has been in the market for over 5 years and IMHO, this startup has failed to keep its momentum up. In fact, it had given up a long time back. The traffic stats below proves the point. In the recent times, the company got into troubles with its music search engine concept. Anurag Dod, CEO of Guruji.com, along-with other executives, were arrested in Bangalore around an year back, on charges of making the copies of the copyrighted musical works owned by T-Series. But, music search portal was never shutdown after that incident. But, in a striking coincidence, Guruji started to see dips in its traffic since then and its continuing till date.

And now, it seems Guruji has shut down its music search portal completely. Users visiting the music page are redirected to the sites homepage and the music search link has been removed from its homepage too. Its heard that shutting down music search is a business decision by Guruji and they have decided not to make any more investments in their music product.

Well, are you thinking whats big deal about their music search portal ? Then, you will be quite surprised at the stats below. Guruji portal is one of the top hits in google search for india regional music. In fact, Gurji gets around 10% of its traffic from this music search portal.

Now with the shutdown of music search, 10% more traffic will be cut from their already declining traffic. We couldn’t find out the real reason behind guruji music search portal shutdown. But, we cannot deny the fact that the online music search and streaming market is highly competitive with totally legal players like Saavn.com, In.com, Rediff Songs, the latest Google India music and a plethora of illegal sites like songs.pk and million others.

I see Guruji losing the search market share and not brave enough to put up a strong fight against the hurdles. They could have very well partnered with all local Audio brands (as others did) and made its music service completely legal. May be they have done that after the copyright infringement claim from T-Series, but isn’t paying of well. Whatever it may be, Guruji needs to fight back and needs some fresh makeover badly to regain its search market share. Otherwise, our beloved and made in/by India search engine will rest in peace soon.