Thought Garage

Every now and then I get curious about what Indians are searching for on the internet and go to Google to have a look. This time, I am totally surprised to see that Manipur tops in number of searches beating all other IT curious states.

Top Search Keywords in 2009

The following screenshot lists out top 10 keywords originated from India in 2009. Note that these key words are not exactly what is being searched for, but these key words are part of searches.

News, Jobs, Electronics and Travel

For instance, ‘India’ is part of the following searches that tops the list. News Papers top the list, compared to ‘movie stars’ last time I looked at this kind of data.

Next most searched for was “Songs”

This doesn’t surprise me at all, the next most searched for is a place to access, play and download songs.

Manipur tops the list

This is totally surprising to me, that Manipur tops the list beating those IT curious states in keywords related to India. Andhra Pradesh is not even in the top 10.

What are you searching for on Google? Share you thoughts.

Google India recently launched Google Maps with navigation based on landmarks, with landmark information fed by the local community in respective cities. Its quite amazing to see how crowd sourcing could be leveraged where structural data is hard to retrieve.

There is no doubt, that this kind of landmark based directions first introduced in India by Routeguru almost a couple of years back. But, I am quite excited to see Google doing this as I see so many other possibilities that could redefine maps for navigating Indian roads.

Street Views

For instance, what a huge difference it will make if Google could add "Street Views" to those directions? Landmarks in text is something. But a picture of that landmark really makes it the most intuitive way of looking at the map.

Instant offers/coupons en-route

Since directions are based on landmarks, that include local businesses, instant offers and coupons from those businesses en-route would be quite beneficial to all.

So here is my request to Google India Maps team to add “Street Views” and that will be totally outstanding.

Google unveiled a labs feature called ‘Living Stories’ that organizes news related to a topic in a format that best fits the online reader and present all relevant information at one place.

I love this new format. Online news should have been this way in the first place, but I am glad it is headed in this direction.

Watch this YouTube video for a short demo of the new feature from Google Labs.

Check out some of the hot topics of the day…

• Google Living Pages : Executive Compensation Page 
• Google Living Pages : The Politics of Global Warming

Google is really obsessed with "Speed". Google’s browser Chrome is already the fastest browser in the world (2X the nearest competitor) and here is some news that will just blow your mind. Your web could get 2X faster. Wow!!!!

Today we’d like to share with the web community information about SPDY, pronounced "SPeeDY", an early-stage research project that is part of our effort to make the web faster. SPDY is at its core an application-layer protocol for transporting content over the web. It is designed specifically for minimizing latency through features such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression.

…

So far we have only tested SPDY in lab conditions. The initial results are very encouraging: when we download the top 25 websites over simulated home network connections, we see a significant improvement in performance – pages loaded up to 55% faster.

Source:Chromium Blog: A 2x Faster Web

Google’s today logo feature Mahatma Gandhi to celebrate Gandhi’s Birthday on 2nd October.