You could define the average Indian’s life online as B.C (before covid) and A.D (after disease)—such has been the shift in what Indians saw, read or downloaded online before and during the COVID-19 lockdown.
Before ‘coronavirus’ or ‘COVID-19’ started ruling the search bar, the top search keywords online on Yahoo in India for news in the days preceding the outbreak were ‘Delhi election results’, ‘Delhi riots’, ‘Delhi violence’ and ‘JNU violence’. The most searched personalities were ‘Donald Trump’, Arvind Kejriwal (Delhi CM who won a landslide majority in the state assembly polls in the same month) and ‘Jyotiraditya Scindia’, the Congress politician who infamously switched over to the BJP, managing to bring down the Congress state government in Madhya Pradesh in the process.
But as the pandemic hit India and the country went into lockdown, novel coronavirus searches rose by a whopping 427 per cent. The top associated keywords people searched for online included ‘COVID-19 updates’, ‘Symptoms of COVID-19’, ‘COVID-19 treatment’, ‘COVID-19 death toll’ and live tracker of the disease’s tally.
The search trends and keywords were chronicled and compiled in the ‘Search in lockdown’ study, revealed Friday evening. “A lot can change in a month. No one knows this better than Indian users, whose online search priorities changed enormously through the COVID-19 lockdown which began on March 24,” said a statement issued by Yahoo India, which conducted the survey.
Related searches included ‘Lockdown in India’, 'vaccine for coronavirus’, ‘social distancing’ and ‘hydroxychloroquine’ or ‘HCQ’, the Malaria drug that the US called on India to supply; triggering an export ban, a subsequent easing of the same and a Twitter storm.
Interestingly, coronavirus related searches, sites and recommendations became so across the board that the top-searched Indian celebrity on the web, displacing the likes of Priyanka Chopra, Rajinikanth, Salman Khan and Deepika Padukone was Kanika Kapoor. The Baby Doll singer hit the headlines, and the grapevine, after she tested positive and was hospitalised, but not before a negligent-spree of parties and housewarmings that put the lives of hundreds, including top politicians, at risk. In fact, public curiosity peaked so much that she became the most searched Indian celebrity online, among both male and female celebs — superstars Priyanka Chopra, Salman Khan all slipped down. Interestingly, ageing icons Amitabh Bachchan and Rajinikanth both rose up in searches during lockdown due to their awareness campaigns urging the public to stay safe and stay home.
A three-decade-old TV serial also shot up into the list of top searches during the lockdown. After state broadcaster Doordarshan brought back the mythological serial Ramayan, it broke through overnight as a keyword. The pandemic movie Contagion, the story premise of which eerily resembles what has been happening in the past months, also jumped into the top give movie searches in the country.