Sundar Pichai is India's most-searched for business leader in 2015

The India-born Google CEO beat Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and legends like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates; Flipkart is top-searched ecommerce site

It would not have come at a better time than this. Sundar Pichai, the India-born CEO of global Internet giant Google who has been given a rousing reception in India during his two-day visit including an official dinner by the President scheduled for Thursday, turns out to have been the most searched person on the internet in India all this year.

Pichai, who took over at the helm of Google in August this year as a successor to co-founder Larry Page, is currently on a two-day official visit to India that concludes Thursday night. 

According to Google's annual year-end zeitgeist which gives a snapshot of the year's major events and hottest trends, Pichai was the most searched business personality in India. Born in Chennai, Pichai is also an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology (Kharagpur), from where he received his bachelor's degree in Metallurgical Engineering before moving to the US to pursue an MS and then an MBA. 

Interestingly, the top four spots of most-searched business personalities in India were tech titans.

Four years after his death, Steve Jobs, the legendary founder of consumer electronics giant Apple Inc. continued to be remembered by Indians through 2015. In the top-searched business personalities list, based on Google searches conducted in India, Jobs ranked second, followed by Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates. The Gates-run Billl & Melinda Gates Foundation is quite active in India primarily working in areas like healthcare.

 

Close on the heels of Gates is Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of social networking platform, Facebook. Zuckerberg was one of the few Silicon Valley tech CEOs apart from Google's Pichai and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who hosted Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the company's headquarters during the latter's visit to the technology hub in September this year.

Other business personalities who captured Indians' curiosity include Mukesh Ambani, Donald Trump, Dhirubhai Ambani and stock market trader Ashwani Gujral. Interestingly, Rahul Yadav, who is referred as the 'bad boy of Indian startups', was also one of the top searched business personalities. Yadav co-founder and former CEO of real estate search portal Housing.com had to unceremoniously leave the company following his public spat with the company's investors in July this year.

With the boom in the e-commerce segment, Google this year has also come out with a list of top-searched e-commerce companies in India. In 2015, home-grown online marketplace Flipkart was the top-searched e-commerce site on Google followed by domestic competitor Snapdeal. Amazon India, the second largest e-commerce player in India, came in third.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma-founded wallet and e-commerce company Paytm was fourth, followed by OLX, Bookmyshow, Quickr, Myntra and travel portal Makemytrip.