As it does every year for the past decade, American tech giant Google released the most popular searches for 2018 for both the world and India. And the top search string for 2018 for India was for the “World Cup 2018”, a sign of just how popular football is becoming in this country.
And it is not as if cricket has lost its allure in India, as “IPL 2018” was the third-most popular search stream, with “Live score” which could be peculiar to cricket and other sports being the second-most searched term. But politics, predictably took the fourth spot with “Karnataka elections”. The football world cup topped the searches for news items, and predictably sporting events in the Winter Olympics surprisingly came in as the fifth-most popular item despite India barely registering a presence at the snowy games held in South Korea earlier this year. What is interesting is that these results are more democratic since they consider the entire country and not just a few cities; many Indians were curious in the “What is” section about the controversial Section 377 that barred homosexuality.
The Google search history records also give some fascinating insights into what Indians are trying to do. Even though the Supreme Court upheld the right to privacy and limited the scope of the Unique Identity document Aadhaar, the second-most popular how-to item searched by Indians was “How to link mobile number to Aadhaar”. Of course, the most popular item searched had to do with social media and people wanted to know “how to send stickers on WhatsApp”. The most popular movie this year, at least when it came to searches online, was the recently released Rajnikanth-starrer “Robot 2.0” and no matter if many in the entertainment industry do not think of Tiger Shroff as a top star as yet, “Baaghi 2” was the top Bollywood movie searched this year. Irrespective of movie’s failure the success of its songs, “Dilbar Dilbar” was the most popular song searched for this year.
And the famous Malayalee “wink girl” Priya Prakash Varrier was the top-most searched personality, closely followed by the new Mr Priyanka Chopra, Nick Jonas.
Across the world too, the World Cup dominated searches highlighting just how important the quadrennial event is to the globe. But the second-most popular search item was as a result of a tragic death of Swedish electronic musician Avicii. The British Royal wedding and Meghan Markle also filtered to the top of the search pile showcasing how the world is still fascinated by the British Royal family. And even though Stan Lee passed away recently, the creator of so many superheroes for the Marvel empire must be laughing as four of the top movie searches this year were for Marvel movies with the list topped by “Black Panther”.
