In its annual ‘Year in Search’ 2018 report, Google looked across nine categories to highlight the most trending, searched topics from the year in India.
The report also underlines the top trending ‘How to’ related searches for India, which is a popular category. According to Google, the top trending ‘How to’ what ‘How to send Stickers in WhatsApp’. This is not surprising given the popularity of the messaging platform in India as WhatsApp has over 250 million here. The Stickers feature was rolled out to WhatsApp just ahead of Diwali, and has quickly become popular on the app. Given the large base of the app, it explains why the volume of ‘How to send stickers’ search term was so huge on Google.
Indians also wanted to know how to make rangoli, how to get rid of the Holi colour and how to link Aadhar with mobile.
When it came to ‘What is’ category, most Indians wanted to know what was Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, what the Kiki challenge was all about and why everyone was talking about the #MeToo campaign.
Among the most searched movies, Robot 2.0 and Baaghi 2 made the cut in Bollywood and Indians mostly searched for Avengers: Infinity War and Black Panther when it came to Hollywood movies. The most searched person on the list was Priya Prakash Varrier, followed by Nick Jonas, Sapna Chaudhary and Priyanka Chopra.
