Indians search for tips on ‘how to kiss’ on Google

The global economic downturn and its local implications were clearly on India’s mind as Budget 2009 and Satyam’s share price emerged as the fastest rising queries on Google… How boring!

Here’s the interesting part of the 2009 year-end Google Zeitgeist for India: When Indians want tips on how to kiss, they turn to Google! In its ‘how to…’ queries peaking this year, ‘how to kiss’ topped the search charts.

The first result the search throws up is www.wikihow.com/kiss, which has steps, tips and warnings on kissing.

‘How to hack’ and ‘how to meditate’ followed as top search terms, with ‘…flirt’ coming in at seven and ‘…download’ at 10.

India also mourned the untimely demise of the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, and looked for the latest buzz word ‘Twitter’ but without impacting the good old Indian Railways and Gmail, which emerged as the most popular online destinations.

Ahead of Jackson, however, was actor Katrina Kaif as the most popular celebrity, and at number three was actor Salman Khan. Cricket superstar Sachin Tendulkar came a distant No 10 in the most popular celebrity list. Politicians like Rahul Gandhi and Sachin Pilot emerged as the new faces of the country’s political leadership. Google studied the
aggregation of billions of queries.