What's India searching for online?

Posted by Tarkeshwar Thakur, Software Engineer and Alok Goel, Product Manager

In December 2007, for the first time in India, we released a list of most popular and fast rising searches, i.e. the Google Zeitgeist. But you don't need to wait till this December to know what was popular this year; we've just unveiled Google Trends and Google Hot Trends on Google India Labs, giving you a chance to find out what India is searching for on Google by the hour.

What's on our collective mind as we search for information? What's interesting to people right now? Hot Trends will tell you. At a glance, you'll see the huge variety of topics capturing our attention, from current events to sports to political issues to the latest Bollywood gossip. Hot Trends aren't the search terms people look for most often; those are pretty predictable, like [weather] or [games]. Instead, the Hot Trends algorithm analyzes millions of searches to find those that show an unusual and fairly sudden increase in popularity. The outcome is the Hot Trends list. Hot Trends is updated throughout the day, so check back often.

For example, the #1 Hot Trends result on January 9, 2008, was 'tata new car' because of the auto expo going on then. The associated web results and associated news search results give you more context and insight into why people were searching for 'tata new car'. You can see these results by changing the date range on the top left hand corner of the Hot Trends page. As you can see, 'tata new car' has a Hot Trend status of 'spicy' -- a measure of its popularity.

Together with Hot Trends, we also launched Google Trends for India. You can view search patterns and interest in their favorite topics. You can compare the popularity of multiple queries (e.g. different Bollywood stars) and see which cities and states search for them the most.

Looking ahead to what 'Valentines Day' might mean to us, keep checking out Hot Trends and Trends for insights into the mind of India