No, Narendra Modi is not the 'most searched' person on Google

The latest piece of Modi news making the rounds on the Internet is the claim that he is now the most searched person on Google, breaking a record previously held by US President Barack Obama. The veracity of this claim, published by several mainstream news organisations, is however, highly debatable. This blog post by Prashant Pandey, (a portion of which is reproduced here with his permission) offered a strong opinion on the development: [caption id=“attachment_1111297” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Narendra Modi in this file photo. AFP[/caption] I got this Whatsapp message this morning saying,“Narendra Modi has broken the record for the most searched person on Google. Modi entered the record book after his name received maximum number of search on Google in a day. Around 100 crore people searched the keyword Narendra Modi on search engine giant Google. Earlier this record was named after US President Barack Obama. During the US Presidential elections, Barack Obama received 98.77 lac number of search in a single day”. And of course it ended with the punch line “Do you still doubt his charsima and popularity…..pappu is eons behind him!!” Do note the multiple exclamation marks, surely added by the Modi-fan who sent me the text! The first thing I did was search…..what else….Google itself! After watching a Zee TV video over youtube and a story in India Today online, I figured out that the news was most likely bogus. The India Today story titled “Narendra Modi pips Obama to become most searched person on Google” gave a hint of that when it credited unnamed “reports” as its source. Now anyone in the business of journalism knows that when the source is unnamed (another common trick: as per party insiders who didn’t want to be named!), it is most likely suspect. In this case, the fake nature of this news item stands out because it fails even basic scrutiny. The exaggeration is so enormous that it almost looks silly! Either because the propagandist wanted to show Modi as being “a really, really tall leader”, or maybe even “a leader of the world” (!), or because of his poor grip on numbers, the fake news is embarrassing in its proportion, much like the earlier stories that earned Modi the sobriquet “feku” over social media. In his zest to show Modi’s global stature, the search number hasn’t just “inched ahead” of Obama, it has gone ahead by more than 100 times! Even Rajnikant fans must be really offended now! And to imagine that Modi was reaching out to this icon just a few days back! There is a strong sense of déjà vu here. Just a few weeks back, Modi had said “16 percent of China’s GDP is spent on education in that country”. Turned out that the real number was a fraction of that! Also turned out that in reality, the Congress had spent more on education than the NDA government before it had done! What’s worse, the media caught it. Suddenly, his trolls had to become creative in defending the goof up. Someone lied by quoting some obscure and/or non-existing Chinese website; someone else gave some creative explanation of “growth over last year” being 16 percent, not the percentage of GDP, and the media misquoting Modi! I have a feeling this Google story will go the same way! Here’s the typical “pattern” that will unfold now. There will be no statement from Modi himself on his remarkable feat! He will remain silent. The tall leader is so humble he doesn’t comment on such small small achievements! Actually, it’s a very nice way to avoid the embarassment when the truth finally comes out. He can simply disown it. In the meantime, his objective would have been served. ( Read the whole post here) Firstpost also did some research into the claim, looking at the Google Trends data over the last few days. Google Trends measures which topics are garnering the most amount of search traffic on any given day. According to its own data, in India, Narendra Modi was a popular topic on Friday (the day he was officially named the BJP’s Prime Ministerial nominee), but even then, he was eclipsed by searches for ‘Grand Masti’. On Saturday and Sunday, the BJP leader did not make it into the top trends category at all. Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa was the most searched for topic on Saturday, while on Sunday search traffic was dominated by Bigg Boss. Trends data for the US, UK, Australia and Singapore did not show any search data for Narendra Modi at all over the last few weeks. The graph below shows interest in the search term ‘Narendra Modi’ from 2005 to the present: [caption id=“attachment_1111281” align=“alignnone” width=“600”]  Google trends data showing search terms for Modi geographically[/caption] It is still unclear where the rumour originated from, but as pointed out in the blog post above, it is getting a lot of exposure both in the media and via social media and instant messaging. However it is noteworthy to say here that neither Narendra Modi nor the BJP have claimed anything of the sort. Whether or not there will be an official clarification from anyone on the topic however, remains to be seen.