'Utilitarian services drove search volumes in 2012'

Utilitarian services drove search volumes. With more institutions moving their services online for greater convenience, searches for them ticked up accordingly, reveals Google’s Zeitgeist 2012, which offers a perspective on the major events and hottest trends, based on searches conducted in India.

An analysis of the top searched travel websites showed that while railways, airline tickets and hotel booking sites were an obvious trend, a bust booking portal –– redbus.in –– featured at number 3 in the list, making a new trend in how Indians prefer to travel, Google India said in a release.

Exams, traditionally pen-and-ink affairs, are also moving online as Institute of Banking Personnel Selection (IBPS), Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) and Central Board of Secondary Education(CBSE) came in at numbers 1, 2 and 6 in the top overall trending list respectively. This show that young Indians are showing a great deal of interest in government jobs, the Zeitgeist

“Google’s 2012 Zeitgeist reflects data from 1.2 trillion searches in 146 languages globally. With 137 million users, India is the world’s third-largest Internet market and is a good barometer of trends in Indian society as a whole,” said Rajan Anandan, vice-president and managing director (sales and operations), Google India.

“With growing smartphone adoption, mobile searches continued to grow with over 70 million mobile Internet users. We expect India’s next 150–180 million Internet users will access the Internet through their mobile devices. This means that the information that these users will look for will need to be more local and meaningful as already reflected in the kind of search trends we are seeing in the country,” he added.

Zeitgeist’s India data also gave an interesting view of what is troubling Indian users. According to the report, global economic turmoil is what that kept Indians worried, with Sensex being the top searched event this year. Prominent deaths, including those of Vilasrao Deshmukh and Rajesh Khanna, made it to the list as well.