The Hindu Business Line : Google in India’s fast lane; Orkut fast rising search query

Indian netizens continued to swoon over Aishwarya Rai making her the most searched for Bollywood celebrity on search engine Google in 2007, even as newcomer Deepika Padukone — who made her Bollywood debut with Om Shanti Om in November — earned a spot in the top 10 list in the category.

According to the first-ever annual ‘Google Zeitgeist’ report for India (indicating the fastest rising and highest volume search terms submitted to Google in the country), the poster girl of Indian tennis Sania Mirza, was the top Sportstar on Google search, and Mahatma Gandhi the ‘most searched for political leader’.

In a reflection of the rising popularity of social networking service amongst Indian online audiences, Orkut emerged at the top of another category titled the “fast-rising search queries”, followed by YouTube and Gmail, respectively. Other terms such as Map, Google, Indian Railways, Yahoo Mail, Technology, Yahoo and Zapak completed the list of top 10 ‘fast rising search queries in 2007’.

“Social networking tops the list, followed closely by other platforms of online communication and interaction,” Google said.

Methodology

Explaining the methodology of hot searches, Google said its ‘Google Zeitgeist’ was calculated by looking at the aggregation of the most popular and fast-rising search queries submitted to Google by Indian users.

“In compiling the 2007 year-end Google Zeitgeist, we studied the aggregation of billions of search queries people from India conducted on Google. To come up with this list, we looked at several thousand of 2007’s most popular searches, and ranked them based on how much their popularity increased compared to 2006.

“For example, Deepika Padukone’s popularity online soared in 2007. We also gave a proportionately higher score to searches with more traffic increase. Separately, we also computed the most popular queries in 2007 by volume,” Google said.

Amongst the Bollywood celebrities, the pecking order saw Salman Khan take the second slot after Aishwarya Rai, followed by Hrithik Roshan, Katrina Kaif, Shahrukh Khan, Mallika Sherawat, Priyanka Chopra, Kareena Kapoor, and Rani Mukherjee.

While Sania Mirza led the list of top 10 sportstars, other most-searched for Sports personalities were Maria Sharapova, Sachin Tendulkar, John Cena, David Beckham, Cristiano Ronaldo, Rahul Dravid, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Sourav Ganguly, and Anna Kournikova.

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