Tejit: Power Searching The Web

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Written by Charu Bahri

Tuesday, 09 September 2008 00:00

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He surfed, he saw... but found nothing! So this technopreneur sought to conquer the space of content discovery engines, focusing on user-generated content on the Web.

Every successful technology paves the way for further innovation. If you had doubts about this, consider how the evolution of the World Wide Web (WWW) led to the development of a plethora of search engines-- ranging from simple engines to those enabling complex searches.

When you face a problem, launch a start-up with a solution!

Even a decade ago, searching for content on the WWW, where information largely constituted company and people profiles, was overwhelming enough, but now that users also generate content, WWW searches are often like searching for a needle in a haystack! And yet, if users desire to keep themselves abreast of the latest developments in their fields of interest, they must search.

One such user-- Indus Khaitan, a computer science alumnus of the Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra-- faced the same problem as scores of Web surfers. However, instead of being weighed down by the over-abundance of data on the WWW, Khaitan looked around, found no solution to these challenges and put on his thinking cap to devise a way to generate unique tech stories from the 1000 or so top blogs he had personally bookmarked! He says, "As on any given day, a lot of blogs carry the same breaking stories, I was besieged by the duplication of RSS feeds coming my way. All I wanted was a simple way to read non-duplicated content around the same topic!"

In addition, Khaitan sought to avoid having to sift through spam, which is again, a problem every Internet user would like to see being solved once and for all! "Depending on how you look at it," he opines, "80 per cent of blog content is junk (pure spam, link spam, items on sale, etc) but separating the 20 per cent and getting the quality content out is a big problem, which exists even today."

The innovation that is Tejit

Lessons from start-up Tejit: How best to nurture a team

Allow staff to work on cross-projects, so they feel they're making the most of their skills
Encourage individual team members to select tasks they can contribute the most and the best to
Be open to ideas coming from junior team members
Install a feedback system so that your team gets 'fresh' ideas from the people that matter-- your clients
Institute an effective reward system

Â Tejit's timeline

Jan. 2007 - Idea conceived

Sep. 2007 - Tejit incorporated and operations started

May 2008 - Sold to SezWho

Khaitan's initial solution to these challenges was a very small Java-based blog spider and other small-footprint software applications to give him distinct content from the common stories being posted on multiple blogs. Of course, Khaitan's background helped him in this task. Having worked on RSS with PCL-Mindware, VeriFone, Symantec and other search and content related start-ups since 2001, by early 2007 he had accrued valuable experience in search technology-- in particular, the semantic analysis of content and software development.

Tejit was born in September 2007 soon after Khaitan had developed a working prototype, so to speak, to circumvent these challenges. As the founder of Tejit, he bootstrapped the start-up using his personal savings and some family money. Tejit, the breakthrough innovation, may be described as a discovery engine of user-generated content. Khaitan explains it in more detail, "In essence, it is a way of discerning high-bits of relevant content in aggregated user-generated content consisting of blogs and Twitter messages. The problem we are trying to solve is to unearth relevant information from the growing corpus of user-generated content. Unlike most search engines that organise content around keywords, we have tried to organise content around the subject matter of each blog post-- such as people, products, movies, and other topics which form the centre of discussion in blogs, social networks, and forums."

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