It is that time of the year when we reflect back on the current year and make resolutions for the next. This reflection can be based on anything, e.g., individuals, city or country. We took some time to reflect on how the year 2009 was for "Connected India". This year, we have put additional focus on users connected through their mobile phones, i.e., users who use internet from their phones. This focus was particularly important given that our mobile search traffic this year grew 4 times compared to last two years put together. For this analysis, we mined billions of anonymous search queries that we got from Indian users to get glimpse into the zeitgeist — the spirit of the times.

We have put together various interesting lists for you here. People turned to internet to know more about everything that was happening around. Indian general elections, the two budgets, global recession and the Satyam scam - everything was hot on internet. On the tech side, Twitter's growth has been astounding and the launch of Window 7 was much talked about. ISRO impressed the world with Bhuvan, a product that allows user to discover and explore earth in 3D mode with specific emphasis on the Indian region.

While there are lot of interesting insights but what surprised us is the relation between desktop and mobile traffic. Mobile internet has higher usage early mornings and late evenings whereas desktop has higher traffic during the day . We call this counter cyclical nature of desktop and mobile. This shows that users have inherent desire to search and consume information throughout the day and mobiles phones are coming in very handy when users are away from their desktops. Cleaning up your emails in the morning, keeping in touch with your orkut friends, watching You Tube videos and entertaining yourself with Bollywood content; it's all now part of the day of mobile phone users.

If you are curious to analyze trends in an area of your interest then try Google Trends . This tool allows you to compare traffic volume for multiple search queries on a relative scale (e.g. cricket, football ) along with what is rising faster. The tool also allows you to compare traffic trends among websites as well through feature called "trends for websites" or view a specific vertical through Google Insights.

Last but not the least, all of the search queries we studied were anonymous — no personal information was used. Have fun analyzing the India 2009 Zeitgeist.

Posted by Alok Goel - Product Manager, Jignashu Parikh - Software Engineer