NEPAL News INTERVIEW

Is jkhoj.com trying to replace Google Search Engine in Nepal?

Is jkhoj.com trying to replace Google Search Engine in Nepal?

jkhoj.com is a Nepali search Engine developed by PinLLC. This search engine is currently active but also in development and testing. The jkhoj.com search engine is a search engine that returns the search query results exclusively from within Nepal and Nepali websites only.

The jkhoj.com first started as a demo Nepali Search Engine that indexed more than 4000 Nepali websites and ~1000 government websites and subdomains. Later, it was launched with the brand name jkhoj.com This search engine also supports the Nepali search query and returns its results.

jkhoj.com home page

The search engine also gives the option of clickable shortcuts which include the most searched keywords. You can either conduct a text search or an image search on the search engine.

This search engine will make it easier to access local data which are usually pushed back by other contents in the Google Search Engine. So, it will be a huge resource for accessing Nepali websites only when you are searching for the relevant information.

jkhoj.com search results

ICTByte did an interview with PinLLC, the maker of jkhoj.com to know more about the search engine and future plans.

Also read: Sthaniya Taha App(Local level app) Review

Interview with PinLLC regarding jkhoj.com

1. Can you give some insights into the Nepali Search engine | Jkhoj?

Around the end of March 2020, we had a demo Nepali search engine based on mostly open-source tools and frameworks under the hood but we soon outgrew the achievement of original developers.

“We soon discovered a lot of visibility with just public website crawling, as we could easily find which websites were interrelated financially and business-wise to each-other, we could easily find hacked websites in most cases, we could easily assess the quality of Nepali websites and we could easily monitor any keyword on any websites all over Nepal daily and periodically.”

Such insights were only available to big search engine providers, previously.

2. Why did you think about this concept and the start of your journey?

PinLLC, as a startup, have a number of high-quality software development project idea to juggle from and not enough finance to hire staff to achieve everything at once.

This all started as a side project out of curiosity and to demonstrate the technical fitness of Pin L.L.C. startup, as we had co-workers juggling multiple jobs in SEO, content writing, and online marketing as this was their bread and butter —  Google and Facebook had become their new religion.

So out of irritation, came the idea, why not just replace google! We soon realize this can be done quicker!

3. Tell us something about founders and contributors.

PinLLC Pvt. Ltd. is a single ownership company. We are looking for co-founders and investors so we can out-grow. jkhoj.com started with a one-person effort, we planned to outgrow but the lockdown forced our business to shrink.

PinLLC started about a year ago with a goal to provides Managed IT exclusively to Nepalese business as the overall quality of the Nepalese ICT sector is not so good.

(We are mainly ICT security experts, software development, website and managed server hosting company with more than 10 years of individual experience working exclusively with large international clients only). 10 -15 years ago it was difficult to make a living earning Nepalese rupees form Nepalese clients so we focused on dollar earning from international clients as the ICT market then was small.

But again, back to square one, the situation have not changed much now, with crowded IT colleges and fresh graduates all over in a sense the market is flooded with low quality labor which is not necessarily a bad thing but our country couldn’t retain the highly experts with decades of experience and the market is flooded with cheap IT products.

“Nepali IT market is still small, many simple software developments with small users base… can be achieved by interns and developers with few years of experience and/or inter-personal links but software can quickly outgrow their original goal and without a strong foundation under the hood, it becomes a problem.”

There is ever going brain drain of highly experienced technical experts with high salary/expectations to foreign land as jobs opportunity locally are limited and road to (good?) government or banking job very opaque.

4. What are your main goals and achievements that you want to achieve through this jkhoj?

Maybe launch a search engine for every country and interlink them. Re; point [1] Help all retain their data locally within their own boarder.

5. What are the new things that one can get through this and how this concept can impact Nepali people using search engines?

This is a local search engine and we return local search data exclusively within Nepal. Before this, we only had multiple business directories of Nepali businesses that needed to be manually updated and not very flexible enough.

6. What kind of Nepali websites and governmental sites are you focusing on? Can you please mention some that are already listed.

We have indexed more than 4000 Nepali websites and ~1000 government websites and subdoamins so far.

The search engine only keeps 15-30 days of crawl history. To optimize the limited resource we have, we are focusing to index only good quality Nepali websites for the time being. A few large Nepali  news portals and websites did not take us seriously and have blocked our engine from crawling  but they are missing out and not us.

7. What are your future plans?

We are looking for financial partners so we can invest in software development to refine the search results and search algorithms further to return best results and to develop our other software products that is in the pipeline.

8. Your few last words for everyone.

With so much of online resource available now, no software product or dream is impossible. Use tools that bring output the fastest, optimization can happen latter.

For beginners, in the world of software, if you do not have good mentors, overall vision, and tool-sets you many go in circles and spend months if not years not achieving much output overall.

Get a wide range of experience working for others but build your own product instead of working for someone else for your whole life as when the day you resign… the only thing left with you is your skills.

This is the end of the interview regarding jkhoj.com. The jkhoj.com search engine has a huge potential to grow and fulfill its goal. Have you tried using jkhoj.com? How satisfied are you with the jkhoj.com search engine? Leave your comments below.

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About Author

Robin Gurung

Robin is a BSc. CSIT graduate, interested in tech and digital marketing. His hobbies includes watching movies and traveling.