I confess, I haven’t heard of these two companies earlier. A press release announces that Nasdaq-listed Web2 Corp has acquired ByIndia.com, a search engine for India which claims to do a “Baidu” in the country. The press release claims that ByIndia acquisition is a strategic route to capture one of the fastest growing online communities in the world (is Indian internet population growing fast enough, by the way?).
The release claims: “Built by Indians for Indians, ByIndia.com has potential to dominate the search field in a country that promises to be the largest online population by 2010…We believe we are in early with a great product,” said William Mobley, Chairman and CEO of Web2 Corp. “India is a massive market that is gaining economic footing. ByIndia.com is the best product available for this audience…we plan to improve upon it. We see a Baidu-like opportunity to create the definitive community for this vast population.”
Editor: I checked out the site. It would be a challenge for the company to get users shifted from Google and Yahoo as they already do a good job in the Indian search engine market. Baidu worked in China because of the cultural peculiarities, and it was there in 1999, in the early days (read this NYT story). I don’t think India has similar circumstances. Then there are pure play Hindi search engines coming up too - like Raftaar. The release says ByIndia.com is yet to launch with its full functionalities. We shall wait and see.