With the Google search bar being the go-to place for any query the internet using population might have, Google Zeitgeist — a Google report of the most popular online searches — is as good an indicator of human curiosity as any. This year’s Google Zeitgeist reveals that Hyderabad was the most searched-for Indian city, coming on top of a list that includes cities like Mumbai and Delhi, the financial and national capitals of India.
If there is anything that can better capture the spirit of the age, it’s social media. So we decided to dig a little deeper to find out where Hyderabad stands when it comes tweets, comments on mainstream news articles, forum discussions, blogs and videos.
The first three months of 2013 were relatively quiet with the only peak in mentions observed on February 22, the date of the Dilsukhnagar blasts; as stories about the blast victims poured in, so did reactions of people across the world resulting in over 20,000 posts on that day alone.
April brought in the IPL and the cricket matches held in the city generated buzz to keep Hyderabad on everybody’s fingertips till mid-May, giving the city over 1,37,000 mentions from April to June.
While the Sunrisers and Hyderabad continued to remain online for cricket, they had noteworthy competition from Narendra Modi who unsurprisingly is one of the most searched for personalities of the year. The prime ministerial candidates visit to the city early in August kept the twittersphere active with both supporters and critics posting away with equal gusto. Another politician that was most searched for was Akbaruddin Owaisi courtesy the hate speech he delivered late last year. A less likely trending topic was the call for blood donations for a 14-year-old infant in Care Hospital — first tweeted by users Blood Donors India and Uday Ram Kumar, and soon retweeted over 150 times, including by influencers like Shashi Tharoor and Harsha Bhogle.
If the first three quarters were all about the peaks, in the last few months, starting October, Hyderabad remained a topic of discussion throughout the quarter, featuring in more than five hundred posts daily. The reason for this is evident — bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh. After the decision on October 3, Hyderabad, linked with keywords like 'Telangana', 'Seemandhra', 'joint capital' and 'bifurcation', has been the hot topic of discussion online and continues to remain so as we move into the next year.
