What Do India and China Have in Common? Just Lady Gaga

Looked at in Google searches, India’s 80 million Internet users and China’s almost 400 million web surfers truly share very, very little.

In fact, a close look at China’s top 10 search terms is likely to feed the insecurity some Indians already feel in relation to the Chinese economy.

Most of China’s top search terms involve Chinese applications or web sites that have more users than India’s online population. Among them, local search engine “Baidu” (why search on a search engine for another search engine? It’s easier than typing in the url yourself, most likely), Tencent’s QQ instant messenger application, gaming destination 4399.com, which apparently has 100 million users and video platform tudou.com, which says it gets 200 million visitors a month.

Middle school drop-out and Internet entrepreneur Li Xingping has two terms in the top 10: 4399.com and web directory hao123.

India’s top search term was “songs,” and its top 10 terms included American firms Facebook, Google and YouTube. The only Indian presence was the booking portal for the Indian Railways, the country’s largest employer which is still the main form of transport for cross-country travel in India.

 

A look at the polls more people suggest that the online population in India is dominated by a passion for Bollywood, which China seems to list a little more cultural alternative. Six of the 10 people on the list hail from the Indian film world. There are also two pop stars (Shakira and Lady Gaga) and cricket icon Sachin Tendulkar.

Among the major research in China (ok, there is a boy band from Taiwan at number one, but that aside) is exaggerated comedian Xiao Guo Degang and Shenyang, a famous actor folk art "cross-talk" that involves two people bantering back and forth clever puns. Guo made headlines this year after an apprentice of his physically assaulted a reporter who tried to interview him. Also on this: bad boy blogger Han Han and the age of 25 Zhang Xiaoyu, famous for photographs of herself, she carried on a website known adult.

In the movies, Bollywood again dominated by India, with "Wings," while Hollywood special effects extravaganza "Avatar" was number one for China. The movie was huge in China, partly because some of the CGI scenery seemed to be drawn from a national park in China (which later tried the name of a cluster of rock after the movie).

Also for the Chinese spectators to history may have been evocative of the epidemic of forced eviction in housing throughout China. "Avatar" do not appear in the top 10 Indian film studies, despite a tribal rights group urged an indigenous community, whose village was threatened by a mining project were in real life "Na'vi," a fictional tribe in the movie.

For India, the only Western movies in the top 10 searches of children involved in some magical way, with the series about the boy wizard Harry Potter and the teen vampire romance "Twilight," making an appearance.

In terms of pop culture, almost the only common denominators to India and China in 2010, Google searches were football, because the World Cup in South Africa, e-go-figure of Lady Gaga, the pop star known for their theatrical sets. Dressed meat, anyone?