It is being seen as a significant achievement for Rediff as it has been chosen ahead of Google, which is currently rated as the best search engine in the world. Indiatimes.com had gone hammer and tongs with its Google-powered search engine only two months back ahead of the much hyped launch of Yahoo! in India.
Nitin Gupta, president and COO, Rediff.com, said: "The users' acknowledgment is consistent with our own understanding of the environment and our abilities to meet the needs of our users, in both the work and home environment. As Indians increasingly use the Internet, we are encouraged by their feedback and look forward to offering relevant information, services and proper enhancements to them."
Disregarding Rediff.com's feat, Yomesh Doshi, chief manager at Times Internet, said: "Going by the user's response, we still are the best search engine."
Rediff Search combines an extremely high-relevance directory -- a "relevance engine" -- that has been created and is maintained by an in-house team, with the globally renowned Inktomi search technology.
Although the search engine doesn't return as many matches as some other popular search engines do, it seems to be more popular as the matches are more "relevant".
The award could have some effect in diverting traffic to rediff.com from other search engines, including indiatimes.com. Even Yahoo! changed its search engine technology to Google from its earlier used Inktomi.
