Priya Varrier 'winks' India's most searched personality tag in 2018: Google

Priya Prakash Varrier's iconic 'wink' has helped the Malayalam actress earn the honour of being the 'most searched personality' in India this year on Google, ahead of celebrities like Priyanka Chopra and Salman Khan.

According to Google's Year in Search, Varrier ranked numero uno in the most searched personalities list in India ahead of Nick Jonas, Sapna Choudhary, Priyanka Chopra, Anand Ahuja, Sara Ali Khan, Salman Khan, Meghan Markle, Anup Jalota and Boney Kapoor.

Globally, Meghan Markle -- who married Prince Harry earlier this year -- topped the list of most searched people. The list included names like Demi Lovato (singer), Sylvester Stallone (actor), Logan Paul (actor and Internet celebrity) and Khloe Kardashian (television personality).

The songs that ruled the roost included Neha Kakkar's Dilbar Dilbar, Arijit Singh's Tera Fitoor and Atif Aslam's Dekhte Dekhte from Bollywood.

Interestingly, the lone English entrant in the top 10 list was the Latin hit song Despacito, which also happened to make it to the Year in Search list last year.

In terms of overall searches on Google in India, the biggest volume was around FIFA World Cup 2018. A large chunk of the search volumes in India included topics like live score, IPL 2018, Karnataka election results and Big Boss.

Indians also turned to Google to learn new things with 'How to send stickers on Whatsapp' topping the 'How to' list, followed by looking for ways to link Aadhaar with mobile number, make rangoli, port mobile number and invest in bitcoin.

A large volume of search queries from India -- which is estimated to have over 450 million Internet users and is among the largest smartphone markets globally -- included topics like 'What is section 377', 'What is happening in Syria', 'What is kiki challenge', 'What is me too campaign' and 'What is ball tampering'.