Leasiders Sanjay Arora and Ruby Singh are reinventing the internet search engine

Million short foundersLeasiders Sanjay Arora and Ruby Singh are out to change the world of internet search engines.

Since 2012 the husband-and-wife team have been busy developing their unique internet search engine business.

Essentially Million Short gives users the capability to customize their internet searches through the use of filters to include or exclude sites based on their popularity, advertising, live chat options and e-commerce as well as refining searches based on countries and locations of origin.

Sanjay and Ruby are working on expanding the business into new markets, such as selling subscriptions to employment recruiters and libraries. Within the next couple of months they plan to launch a new application which would allow parents to screen and monitor the internet searches of their children and to work collaboratively with them to find information for education, information and fun.

“Currently there is no application like this on the market,” Sanjay says. “Searching the internet is a big deal. Everybody does it, but it has almost become a monopoly controlled by the big search engine companies. We offer specialized services and technologies to help people refine and improve the quality and depth of their searches.”

The business has done nicely. It employs about 50 people in an office in downtown Toronto, but Sanjay hopes one day to find a suitable location and move the entire operation to Leaside. “I got the idea for the business here, the technology was patented here and we live here,” he says. “I guess you could say we’re real Leasiders.”

Leaside has proven to be the ideal place to build their business and raise a family. The couple moved into a house in Leaside in 2008 where they started to raise their growing family, which now consists of eight- and three-year old sons and a six-year-old daughter. Sanjay and Ruby love the proximity of their home to local schools for the children and the fact that Leaside is a safe, secure community which combines a feeling of living in both the big city and the suburbs.

“On one side you’ve got Bayview with all the shopping and restaurants of a city, and then on the other you’ve got Laird, which has more of a neighbourhood feel with the community centre where my kids play hockey,” Sanjay says. “It offers the best of both worlds.”