As 2008 comes to a close, it is time to reflect on what captivated us during the year. With this intention, we mined billions of search queries that we got from Indian users to give us a glimpse into the zeitgeist — the spirit of the times.
To understand this collective psyche we created three classifications of top ten queries: queries by volume, queries showing significant growth and queries from various categories such as bollywood celebrities, sports stars and "how to" requests. For the first time, we also analyzed the top ten queries from mobile and queries in Hindi and Tamil. The complete list or zeitgeist is fascinating, and we encourage you to browse through the results. We've highlighted a few of our observations below.
* Social networking sites continue to make the top ten lists for most popular and fastest growing queries for the second consecutive year continuing to demonstrate their importance in our everyday online activities.
* We compared search patterns between desktop searches and mobile phone searches. In the morning, desktop searches are fairly low while mobile searches are fairly significant, most probably due to people catching up on email and updating social networks. As the day progresses and people reach their offices, the search volume from desktop shoots up dramatically as people track stock prices and search for business related information. However, as people leave for their homes in the evening, mobile search volume once again rises and then peaks near midnight as people get their daily fill of entertainment news, specifically bollywood.
* It was equally interesting to see our users asking a wide range of questions such as "Where to invest", "why MBA", and "How to get pregnant".
If you are curious to analyze trends in an area of your interest then try Google trends . This tool allows you to compare traffic volume for multiple search queries on a relative scale (e.g. Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi ) along with what is fastest rising . The tool also allows you to compare traffic trends among websites as well through feature called trends for websites or view a specific vertical through Google Insights.
As always during our Year-End Zeitgeist, all of the search queries we studied are anonymous — no personal information was used. Have fun analyzing our India 2008 Zeitgeist.
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