Sunny Leone Defeats Modi to Top the Google's Most Searched Celebrity in India

Despite the Lok Sabha elections in 2014 and the aggressive digital campaigns by Bhartiya Janata Party, Sunny Leone, the Hindi film actor of Indo-Canadian and American origins, pipped Prime Minister Narendra Modi to become the most searched personality in the country during the year.

Modi was the second most searched celebrity, accoridng to Google's 'Year in Search' list for 2014. The Prime Minister is followed by Bollywood actors Salman Khan, Katrina Kaif, Deepika Padukone, Alia Bhatt, Priyanka Chopra, Shah Rukh Khan and Poonam Pandey.

"Prime Minister Narendra Modi was one of the top most searched personalities this year, coming ahead of Bollywood biggies - the first time a politician has gained more search popularity than entertainment celebrities," intnernet major Google said in a statement. "The historic 2014 Lok Sabha elections emerged as India's first digital election and revealed that an online presence mattered considerably for all political parties."

The term 'Elections 2014' topped Google India's trending lists in 2014, followed by FIFA 2014, iPhone 6, GATE 2015 and IPL 2014.

Searches for Football World Cup and Indian Premium League "broke records", Google said, with top searches being around teams, players, scores, and match results.

Besides elections, the death of Sunanda Pushkar and the unsolved mystery of Malaysia Airlines 370 also generated search curiosity. Cricketer Virat Kohli stood tenth in this list of 'personalities across categories', ahead of Sachin Tendulkar, who remained among the top searched for sports personalities despite his retirement.

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Google Launches Hindi Voice Search, to Add More Regional Languages Soon

Amit Singhal, Prakash Javadekar and Rajan Anandan at the launch of the Indian Langauge Internet Alliance in New Delhi.

Aiming to bring 300 million people online, search firm Google has partnered content providers such as ABP News and Amar Ujala, along with government agency, CDAC to make regional content available on Internet.

Google, which currently offers voice search in English, has also added Hindi language service and plans to other languages like Tamil, Marathi and Bengali to the list in coming months.

"India has about 200 million Internet users with about 5 million new users being added every month with 100 per cent coming through mobile devices. At this pace, India will overtake the US in terms of number of users in the next 12 months," Google India Vice President and Managing Director Rajan Anandan said in New Delhi.

However, only 198 million people in the country are estimated to be proficient in English with most of them already on the Internet, he added.

With that in mind, the Indian Language Internet Alliance (ILIA) has been formed, he said.

"The group is committed to promoting the growth of Indic- language content online. ILIA hopes to enable 300 million Indian language speakers to become highly engaged Internet users by 2017," he said.

The Alliance will work together to accelerate building Indian language content for Indians who will come online for the very first time, mostly via smartphones and mobile devices.

"If Internet is available in Indian languages, then the Internet usage will go up to 50 crore and it is possible. This will help in realisation of digital India initiative of the government. It is an important initiative," Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar said.

As a part of its efforts, Google showcased demos of voice search in Hindi and launched a website 'www.hindiweb.com' to help Hindi-speaking Internet users discover Hindi content across websites, apps, videos and blogs.

"India is a significant market for us and is growing at a strong pace. Internet is empowering and that is why we want to take Internet to the next billion," Google Senior Vice President Search Amit Singhal told PTI.

He added the alliance will help content creators build relevant content for these new Indian language mobile users.

"Its a catch 22 situation. There is not enough regional content and current user base is also small. Through ILIA, we want to address both the issues," he said.

Source: BusinessToday

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