Thought Garage

Its Diwali now…, in fact whenever you want if you are in India. No restrictions. No need for special permissions. No proof of special occasions. Enjoy whenever you want.

Pictures taken from the first generation iPhone.

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.

That’s right. American Prime time TV will have two shows with and about Indians and Indian Americans.

The two comedies — "Nirvana" at Fox and "Outsourced" at NBC — have something else in common: They both are ensemble shows about Indians and Indian-Americans.

Source : Reuters

You might have already spotted Anil Kapoor in the new “24” season.

I wondered last night why NDTV.com is so desperate? Desperate enough to put Advertisements right on top of content and those ads won’t let you read content unless you click on them.

This morning, out of curiosity I checked how NDTV.com is doing by looking at traffic on the site at Compete. And this graph may explain the desperation.

Unique visitors to NDTV.com dropped by 40% in 2009.

Source: NDTV.com Profile on Compete.com

However, the site was able to maintain number of page views more or less the same. So, it sounds little obvious that as they are loosing on unique visitors, they may want to monetize those still visiting and make up for the difference. May be!

Or that Ads on top of content may be just a bug. Hopefully.

Ever wonder which State produce Rice in India? Well, except Rajasthan its in every state in India, with West Bengal leading with 6.15M hectares. Here are snapshots showing the map and top 9 states from a latest report(2009).

Source: Hybrid Rice Seed Scenario in India : Problems and Challenges (PDF)