search-trends on S Anand

What does India search for?

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 14:33:19 +0000

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been tracking the top 5 hot searches in India on Google Trends (http://www.google.co.in/trends). Here are the results:

If you're interested in making visualisations out of it, please feel free. But there's one particular thing I'm trying out, which is to categorise these searches and see if there's a trend around that. I've added a "Tag" column.

Could you please help me tag the spreadsheet: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Av599tR_jVYgdE5zTU5QWjcxVWVCaTBuY3d0NkUtc1E&hl=en_GB

It’s publicly editable, no special access required. If you could stick to the tags I already have (Business, Education, Entertainment, News, Politics, Sports, Technology), that would be great. If not, that’s fine as well.

And if you’ve made any visualisations or done any analysis using this data, please do drop a comment.

Comments

Rockey Nebhwani 2 Dec 2010 11:50 pm: I think simple conclusion may be Bollywood, Politics, Jobs, Stock :-)

Yahoo Clues API

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 13:31:48 +0000

Yahoo Clues is like Google Insights for Search. It has one interesting thing that the latter doesn’t though: search flows.

It doesn’t have an official API, so I thought I’d document the unofficial one. The API endpoint is

http://clues.yahoo.com/clue

The query parameters are:

q1 – the first query string
q2 – the second query string
ts – the time span. 0 = today, 1 = past 7 days, 2 = past 30 days
tz – time zone? Not sure how it works. It’s just set to “0” for me
s – the format? No value other than “j” seems to work

So a search for “gmat” for the last 30 days looks like this:

http://clues.yahoo.com/clue?s=j&q1=gmat&q2=&ts=2&tz=0

The response has the all the elements required to render the page, but the search flows are located at:

response.data[2].qf.prevMax – an array of queries that often precede the current one
response.data[2].qf.nextMax – an array of queries that often follow the current one

The other parameters (such as demographic, geographic and search volume information) is pretty interesting as well, but is something you should be able to extract more reliably from Google Insights for Search.

Comments

Erudite Technologies 5 Aug 2011 2:18 am: Thanks for this article! We were using this recently until Yahoo changed the URL for the Yahoo Clues API. It is now as follows: Base URL: http://clues.yahoo.com/analysis Parameters: nu - Not sure, I haven’t tried changing this. Usually set to 1. s - Same as above. Set this to j ts - I’m guessing this is the time range in the format: yyyyMMdd,yyyyMMdd tu - Not sure about this either. Haven’t changed this away from ‘month’ q1 - The first Query q2 - The second Query l - Not sure. Works with 1 lt - Might be the location scope of the query. Defaults to ‘World’ h - Not sure. I have this set to 6 A sample URL might look as follows: http://clues.yahoo.com/analysis?nu=1&s=j&ts=20110704,20110804&tu=month&q2=&q1=Trend&l=1<=World&h=6 The format of the JSON looks to be the same. Hopefully this helps someone else!

Why is nanotechnology popular now

Sat, 15 Apr 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Why is nanotechnology in the top Google queries from India?

Comments

ravi 15 Apr 2006 10:48 am: from all countries in the list indians are the only one with something technical in their queries. hurrah for that
Prabhu 17 Apr 2006 6:03 am: Could be due to the fact that Sujatha is writing an article about it in a tamil weekly
S Anand 17 Apr 2006 7:37 am: If so, Tamil Nadu would have to be a big chunk of India’s Google searches. Given the absense of other Tamil queries, I doubt this was the only factor… but it sure must have contributed!
Gautam 26 Apr 2006 6:05 pm: funny how sania mirza ranks over aishwarya, though !

Google India Zeitgeist

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Google India Zeitgeist.

Google Zeitgeist

Tue, 17 Jul 2001 12:00:00 +0000

Google Zeitgeist: trends in Google searches. (Zeitgeist means “the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era”). Similar to Buzz and Lycos50. Other sites that offer search profiles are AskJeeves, Search.com, Excite, and Goto.

Yahoo buzz

Mon, 18 Jun 2001 12:00:00 +0000

Keep up with Yahoo’s buzz.