As per Google’s zeitgeist, the top 3 searches from India in 2007 were Orkut, YouTube and Gmail (though there is no official list in Zeitgeist site, but the list was confirmed by CNN/IBN which had an official from Google India to discuss the online search behavior of Indians.)
Top political search was Mahatma Gandhi and sports person to top the list was Sania Mirza.
Before you take the list seriously, here are a couple of stupid trends that I have noticed at Google Zeitgeist (number in brackets denote the rank of that query)
- June 2007: BobMarley (15), coconut (13), dhoom3 (14), 3gp player (15)
- August 2007, the top queries were fanaa (1), voldemort (3), las vegas (4),puma (6), crazy frog (15)
- September 2007: charminar(1), modular kitchen (5), kanpur (7), jodhpur (8), winnie the pooh (14)
- October 2007: zapak games (1), italy (7), matheran (11), kuch kuch hota ha i(12),incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in (14)
- November 2007: bank of maharashtra(1), easymovies(2), financial express(13), logitech(14)
You mean - Bob Marley was one of the top queries in June? Fanaa, after few years of it’s release makes it to #1 search query? And a small hill station (matheran) makes it big in Google search? And why coconut?
Is this what India really searches for? And why is it that Orkut is not the top search query in any of the monthly zeitgeist, but makes it to #1 in the yearly list? I have noticed these erratic results earlier and stopped giving any weightage to zeitgeist data (maybe they actually have pigeons to mine this data?).
I am not too sure whether the 2007 announcement is actually a plug to get some free PR. Why Google doesn’t have the list in zeitgeist site?, and instead used TV route to share these stats (Tech2 has the entire list)?
I dunno the answer. Do you?
Well, these are GOogle plugs – I am suprised to see all the top searches belonged to Google products!! how come they missed other google products in the “top” query list?
Hello Sihna! I am kind of wondering about the same thing now-a-days … i have been tracking Google Insights on Search for a few days now … my goal being to better prioritize application development on an interactive TV platform that we are building nationwide … and I am getting completely confusing data from that site too. The “rising searches” section gives me a better idea of the non-navigations searches (searches that are not used to find the website) and I find that what makes to the top of list are universities, banks, indian railways, cricket and movies!! There is also a large gap between the news brief that might have driven up that search keyword and the actual rise in the search for that key word. For example the phrase “April Fool” appeared on top of the list today i.e. 4th of April and it suddently appeared with a rate of 2500%. Now I am sure that few people would be googling for “April Fool” today … so there must be a latency in the site’s process. Although I really appreciate Google making this data available and I think it is very helpful … I still wish there was a more immediate way to get this data.
I also searched on this site called Alexa … to see what sites are people watching in India … they can give you a list of top 100 sites that were visited from India. I still did not get a good idea of what is India searching for. I am trying to correlate the results of Google Insights with that of Alexa and would write you another post in a day or two …
Meanwhile if you can let me know what tools you use to get a better understanding of what Indians are looking for online … that will be very helpful.
Vineet
Go for Google insights – it has historical data as well.