Hindustanis.Org

For the first time ever, Google has included India in its 2007 end-of-year Zeitgeist annual report.

Zeitgeist pulls together interesting search trends and patterns, and gives search statistics automatically generated based on the billions of searches conducted on Google.

The list is a cumulative snapshot of interesting queries asked by users over time, within country domains, and some on Google.com.

This year’s Zeitgeist also includes an aggregation of search queries on Google’s Indian domain. It reflects both — the most popular, and the fastest-rising global search terms that people have typed on to Google.

The top gaining queries in India for the month of November include: Bank of Maharashtra, easymovies, Income tax department, Pan Card, Lord Hanuman, Maruti True value, Sony Cybershot, Harry Potter, Goa hotels, Hindu astrology, Indigo, Tata Mutual Funds, Financial Express, Logitech, and Miss India.

In the 2007 Google Zeitgeist list, the 10 fastest rising terms globally include iPhone, badoo, facebook, dailymotion, webkinz, youtube, ebuddy, second life, hi5, and club penguin; while the 10 fastest falling terms globally include world cup, Mozart, fifa, rebelde, kazaa, xanga, webdetente, sudoku, shakira, and mp3.

In a separate development, speculation is rife that Google might soon come up with an Indian version of its cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) facility that searches queries in English, while giving results in native languages.

However, there is no confirmation on which languages will be deployed. Meanwhile, the CLIR service can accessed at www.translate.google.com

Web search leader Google is testing an Internet site for sharing knowledge about any subject under the sun, one that could eventually compete with the popular user-edited encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Google’s “knol” project started earlier this week and is working with a group of writers by invitation only, Google vice president of engineering Udi Manber wrote in a company blog post.

“There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it,” Manber said in the post. “The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information … to how-to-fix-it instructions.”

The word “knol” is used to refer to the project and to an entry on the shared Web site. Google’s site will identify the authors posting the information. It will not serve as an editor of the information or endorse what is written on the site.

The site will eventually be opened to the general public and allow users to submit comments, questions or edits, as well as rate posts. Knol writers will be able to include ads in their posts, sharing the revenue with Google.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is working on a community- developed Web search service that would compete with search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

Source - Reuters