Our brother, Syed Yasin is in the news again. His innovative mind came into limelight when he first invented the currency counting machine ten years back when he was still in college. This time, he is news for inventing a very complex search algorithm that is poised to take the mammoth google head-on-head. Br.Yasin was in our office couple of weeks back explaining the algorithm with a live demo and we were simply amazed.

The alpha release of his search engine is already out at http://www.icognue.com/

Bengaluru, June 8: In Bengaluru’s Frazer Town, a man obsessed with artificial intelligence had been inventing and tweaking algorithms to judge if a machine can learn from itself. Thirty three-year old Mr Syed Yasin’s part time efforts took a spanking turn after Sobha Renaissance, an IT services firm he works in, wanted the home lab shifted to office for "full-time" research. Now, the company is readying a mini-Google.

At another end of the town, Mr Anurag Dod and Mr Gaurav Mishra have been plotting the Baidu of India. The young duo gave up lucrative jobs in eBay and Nokia to start up Guruji.com, a search engine specialising in local language, music, and film timings.

Both the firms, the literal Davids, will lock horns with Goliath Google in a short while, invade a space where both Yahoo and Microsoft have largely struggled.

Comparisons look inane at the moment: while Sobha’s search engine iCognue is in the alpha stage, Guruji is just a year and a half old with 45 employees and an Indian market share in low single digits. Google, in comparison, has 17,000 people globally, revenues of $16 billion, and a market share of around 65 per cent in the country. It has indexed billions of web pages - Sobha has indexed just 2 million and Guruji about 200 million.

It’s not just the spirit of innovation in India’s silicon valley that is making the small take on Google’s might. There is a strong business case. Consumption of Internet content is low in India with less than 50 million Web users in a country of a billion people. Google’s mindshare, then, is on a very small base. "In the next four years another 100 million Indians will use the Internet for the first time. Given that these users will have no affinity towards the established brands, the opportunity for Guruji is huge," Mr Mishra, COO of the firm, says. The prospect is bright but will still need a mammoth exercise to be converted into success. Niche and relevant context appears to be the cornerstone around which the Indian search brigade plans its march.

Mr Yasin has invented a self-learning mathematical algorithm that betters the search giant in certain ways: while Google is a great key-word search and scores high on relevancy, Sobha’s new search engine delivers meaningful context. One word may have multiple meanings - Java, for instance is a coffee, a technology, and an island in Indonesia. Users of iCognue get options to select the appropriate information.

"Our algorithm understands the relationships between words," says Mr Yasin.

While nobody has perhaps invented a machine that understands a document to the level of human intelligence, he claims the algorithm can definitely understand a document to know the important words by itself, develop an automated summary, besides mapping related words.

So when users know what they want but are unable to provide the exact search query, the search engine attempts to help. Names of diseases or drugs, for instance, can be hard to remember or even spell correctly. If one looking for ‘obsessive compulsive disorder’ simply keys in mental health, the algorithm identifies topics contextually related to mental health.

"Google lacks search refinements, the sense of which words are related to what. A search for mental health in Google throws up far less contextual topics than we do - this when our index size is less than one per cent of Google’s size," the inventor tells. Google does provide some context but it comes from user traffic and not the data the algorithm learns, he adds.

Better context is also Guruji’s target. It is a key word search engine but the firm is building an Indian context. "There is a limited way in which you can express intent with just key words. So we need context to match a search to the fact that the user is Indian," states Mr Dod, CEO of the company. For instance, people in different geographies can search for camera stores.

Guruji is likely to list Indian websites to buy from rather than foreign e-commerce shops.

Both Sobha and Guruji have taken baby steps in monetisation. While the latter has an advertising model similar to Google’s Adwords programme, Sobha is debating multiple possibilities — Adwords, Adsense, even licensing the algorithm.

The firm’s CEO Dr. Madhu Nambiar knows if enough resources are pumped in, search could be a much larger treasure than IT services. By end-2009, the company may be eyeing $200 million in search revenues.








Thanks and regards,

Syed Yasin| Inventor – LMai, Principal Architect Search Algorithms & Technology
E-mail:syed@renaissance-it.com | Extn: 1944
Sobha Renaissance Information Technology (P) Ltd.
An SEI-CMM, P-CMM & SSE-CMM Level 5 Company |BS ISO/IEC 27001:2005 & ISO 9001:2000 Certified
A Top 50 Fast Growing Technology Company (Deloitte, 2006 & 2007) | A Six Sigma Practice Company
Phone: + 91 80 41951999 | Fax: + 91 80 41523300
URL:www.renaissance-it.com | Video Conference: + 91 80 41252222