December 31, 2011

Google says Indians at top in searching adult content online (Dirty, dirty, Indians!)

New Delhi: Given the size of our population, one would have thought Indians get enough sex.

But that still doesn't stop us searching for more. Data collected by Google through its search engine shows that in 2011, seven Indian cities featured in the list of top 10 cities worldwide where the "sex" query was particularly popular.

The rankings might come as a bit of a surprise. Lucknow and Kolkata - cities which pride themselves on their high cultural values -- came in at No. 2 and 3, respectively. Pune was at No. 5, New Delhi at 6, Bangalore at 7, Chennai at 8 and Mumbai at 9. The only non-Indian cities in the list were Colombo, which topped the chart, Lahore at No. 4 and Hanoi at 10. In short, every single city in the top 10 was from Asia. Expect the demographic dividend to last for a while. The famed Indo-Pak rivalry spilled over to this sphere as well, with Pakistan emerging as the country from where Google received the maximum number of search queries for "sex" in 2011. Pakistan had topped the list in 2010 as well.

The data, which is part of Google's Trends application, also reveals that Pakistan tops the all-time list - which maps the period ever since the search engine started collecting the data - while India comes in third behind Vietnam.

Though Google says "Trends provides insights into broad search patterns" and "several approximations are used when computing these results," the data mirrors the volume of actual search queries. To rank regions and cities, the web firm "calculates the ratio of searches for the term coming from each city, divided by total Google searches coming from the same city."

The Trends data is not the only indication that people in India and Pakistan have sex on their mind. A few weeks ago Google had released its Zeitgeist report, which takes a look at the top search queries of the year.

In India, "How to kiss" topped the list of the most popular "how to..." searches. The same query topped the list in 2010 as well. "How to flirt" and "how to love" were the 10th and 11th most popular queries. The "how to kiss" query was equally popular in Pakistan in 2011. India and Pakistan share some basic intincts - which could add a whole new dimension to the phrase, "Make love, not war".

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