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All through Thursday, millions of Indians and Pakistanis were glued to their televisions, watching anchors trying to outdo each other with their coverage of the Indian Army’s raid across the LoC to wipe out terror bases.
At the same time, there was some low-decibel but frenetic activity taking place elsewhere, on both sides of the border. Millions were flocking to the internet to do some research of their own. They were looking for information about the raid, on the basics, and its finer points.
The term ‘surgical strike’ was at the top of the list for people in both nations, reveal Google’s data. In particular, Pakistanis were keen to know the ‘definition’ of the term.
Other search strings that were toppers across the border were ‘what is surgical strike in Urdu’ and ‘Indian surgical strike in Pakistan’.
Breakout territoryAccording to Google Trends, which tracks how often a particular term is entered relative to the total volume across regions and languages worldwide, these search strings were in ‘breakout’ territory. Meaning, search operations with these phrases “grew more than 5,000 per cent”.
On the Indian side, many wanted to watch videos of the ‘surgical strike’, believed to have been carried out by the Army’s Para Special Forces and Ghatak platoons. Other breakout strings on this side of the LoC included ‘Uri attack’, ‘meaning of surgical strike in Hindi’, and ‘Pakistan reaction on surgical strike’.
Google assigns a value of 100 to a search term when its popularity peaks. This value represents the search interest in that topic relative to searches on all topics for a given region and time.
A study of the search results on Google Trends between 10.30 am of September 29 and 1.30 pm of September 30 shows that the search interest on ‘surgical strike’ reached 100 in India at 12.58 pm on Thursday, soon after the Army released information about the mission.
The search value stood at 42 at 12.58 pm in Pakistan on Thursday, when the news was yet to break in that country. However, it had shot up to 100 by 9.38 pm.
Ho humBy the time of this writing, however, people in India had moved on, and the top four trending searches all involved cricket, including for the Pakistan team. Terror mastermind Hafiz Saeed came sixth.
In Pakistan, at the same time, the top searches were for YTPak, Big Boss 8, Bajrangi Bhaijaan, Kumkum Bhagya and Prem Ratan Dhan Payo. Go figure.
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