What is India Thinking during Year-End Week (Dec 22 to Dec 28, 2022)? Are You doing a Responsible Search?

Dear Friends and Students

Yesterday I got this question while I was walking. What is India thinking this week? India’s population is 139 crores. I am sure understanding this question for the population scale is next to impossible. We have different classes of people belonging to the rich, upper middle class, middle class, lower middle class, and poor. Outside basic necessities, if we want to know a broad level of thinking, we need to rely on individual digital search footprints.

Out of curiosity, I analyzed last 1-week daily trends in India on Google! Here is a quick analysis. Maybe I am subjective to error but broadly sets the context for this story.

The total key searches analyzed are 1,62,50,000+. Out of them, 44.3% searched for Sports! 38.4% searched about Religious related aspects (Christmas, Tulsi Pujan Diwas, and Guru Gobind Singh Jayanti), 9.7% searched for famous People related activities (PM Modi, PM Modi Mother’s Health, Ratan Tata Birthday, Salman Khan Birthday, Sushant Singh Rajput, FM Nirmala Sitharaman, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Chanda Kochhar, Curry King, Elon Musk, etc), 4.7% Entertainment, 2% for Employment and Economy, 0.4% for Education, 0.3% Health and 0.1% Environment (trends.google.com

).

I don’t want to comment on why more people trending on sports and less on education, environment, and health. However, the goal of this post is to create awareness of what is “Responsible Search” is.

Google says it spends about 0.0003 kWh of energy on an average search query, translating to roughly 0.2g of carbon dioxide. Searching the web 100 times is equivalent to drinking 1.5 tablespoons of orange juice (store.chipkin.com

). 1 search = 60W light bulb for 17 seconds. It is mind-blowing to hear, it requires 70 billion Kilowatt Hours a year to run the internet, equivalent to 8 big nuclear reactors.

My Dear Students, Responsible Search is an attitude! If you attach a purpose to every search you do, indirectly or directly you are contributing to the environment and economy. 

Would you contribute to Responsible Search in the Year 2023?

Happy New Year 2023
Ravi Saripalle