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Web search reveals the Indian fixation

Anand Parthasarathy

Cricket and Bollywood still favourites

New Google tool can track top searches
Useful for market researchers, advertisers, bloggers

Bangalore: Is this a nation with cricket on its mind? Or is Bollywood “baatein” what most Indians go for?

A new tool developed at Google Labs India, allows one to check on the most popular keywords that users based in India, are entering in their Google searches. The tool called Google Hot Trends, available at http://labs.google.co.in, lists the top 100 searches within the last hour and ranks them in descending order of popularity.

A check at various times of the day when the service was launched showed that this is indeed a cricket-crazy nation: over half of all 100 top searches had a cricket connection.

While the series in Australia was on, searchers sought out information on cricket scores; the Duckworth-Lewis method of deciding who wins — and the weather “down under.”

The weekend launch of new films, nationwide, sets off a heightened Bollywood buzz. On Saturday, the new film “Jodhaa Akbar” and the surrounding controversies saw sites linked to the film and its stars dominate Google searches in India.

Vinay Goel, Google India’s Head of Products, says the tool will be useful for market researchers, advertisers, bloggers and others who need a quick ‘take’ on what is interesting to Indians.

A lot of them have money on their minds — going by the popularity of searches about share offerings and fund managers. One can also enter a search term and check on the statistics of the search.

For more hard core analysis, the Trends tool allows one to trace a graph comparing the popularity of two searches say Kamal Haasan and Rajnikanth or Rani Mukherji and Preity Zinta over an extended period — like the last four years... a nice ‘time passer’ for those who revel in trivia about ‘bold and beautiful’ Page Three people.

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