As India voted in the first phase of the Lok Sabha election on Thursday, netizens trooped the internet, with election related queries ruling the web throughout the day.
Google was swept over with an unprecedented flow of election-related searches -- with reports of EVM glitches and multiple complaints from voters about their names not being on the electoral list or the indelible ink fading -- making for some of the top search results.
After it was revealed in the afternoon by News18 that the ‘Ink’ applied on voters’ index finger this time was coming off easily, the searches related to the issue spiked with a huge margin.
Later, News18 checked the search statistics reports of Google for the last 24 hours and the results were stunning.
The search for ‘How to remove voting ink’ was at the peak in India at 2:44 pm on Thursday afternoon.
The Google report considers the peak search to be 100 in a given time-frame. Accordingly, in the time-frame of 24 hours – April 10 to April 11 – it was 2.44 pm on April 11 when the search peaked at 100. During the five hours – 2 to 7 pm – on the same day, search scored to be more than 50 in comparison with the peak of 100.
The search engine kept a track of every 8 minutes. The southern states of Andhra Pradesh (100) and Telangana (53), along with Delhi (31), Maharashtra (23) and Uttar Pradesh (19) were on top of the list of seekers of results for ink removal.
Along with this, another term – How to remove ink from finger after voting – saw a 300% hike in searches during the same time patterns. Upon observing the search patterns for this query, it was found that the search spikes whenever elections are held anywhere in the country. This trend has persisted for the last five years.
Meanwhile, the maximum searched term on the day of polls was ‘How to vote India’ and was searched more than one million times by the end of the day across India.
Some of the other related search queries included, election 2019, Election commission voters list, election 2019 list, Lok Sabha elections, how to check voter list, voting date 2019, and Online voting for election 2019 in India.
A look at the state-wise scores revealed that Andhra, where voting for Assembly elections was held simultaneously, topped the list with a 100.
Uttarakhand, Karnataka and Telangana scored 59, 47 & 46, respectively. Apart from these states, all the other states were searching for terms related to elections and voting.
Surprisingly, the search for ‘Online voting system in India’ too, spiked in the last week. Google data shows that the state of Karnataka witnessed the maximum number of searches for online voting. Considering that to be 100 per cent, state of Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh scored 53 and 39, respectively.
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