China tops search for N Chandrababu Naidu

Vijayawada: Outside of India, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu is known to be popular in the United States where a large number of Telugus reside. Surprisingly, Google Trends indicates that there are more searches for Mr Naidu in China.

After India, China is the country from where the most searches on Google for Mr Naidu were registered.

China was followed by the United States; most of the searches came from New Jersey, Virginia, Texas, California and New York.

Google was blocked in China since 2010 and was recently restarted. Even during the period of blockage, the search engine was accessed through Virtual Private Network which allowed users to search for Mr Naidu. Hong Kong, the Special Administrative Region, is the top Chinese city to search for Mr Naidu through various search terms.

However, in Singapore, Malaysia and Japan, which have caught the attention of Mr Naidu, he is not much searched.

Interestingly, Mr Naidu is more popular than his dream capital city Amaravati.

Also, Mr Naidu is less searched for on Google when compared to his Telangana counterpart K. Chandrasekhar Rao, for whom most of the searches outside India came from Hong Kong and, strangely enough, Sweden. Mr Naidu has visited China, Japan, Singapore and other countries seeking investments in AP. The Google Trends reports include the search data during 2004 and 2015.

Even as the AP government is promoting its new capital Amaravati, Vijayawada appears to trend more on the Internet. According to Google Trends, Vijayawada is the most searched city in AP followed by Vizag and Guntur in 2015 on the search engine.

The government had mounted a series of publicity drives including initiatives like My Brick My Amaravati, apart from the grand foundation stone laying ceremony. There was also much publicity for, and controversy over, the concept of land pooling.

Besides, the issue of environmental clearances and issues had kept the capital city trending on social networking sites for months.

However, Vijayawada, which is turning into something of a base of operations for Amaravati, beats the new city. Vijayawada currently hosts government officials and important establishments are gradually shifting there.

Vijayawada is followed by Visakhapatnam, the largest city in AP. Amaravati is nowhere close to the existing cities.Vijayawada has an average search rate of 77 and Vizag has 58. Guntur has 36 and four for Amaravati.

While Amaravati is searched for developments of capital Vijayawada and other cities are searched for jobs and other such purposes by the netizens in AP followed by Bolivia, US, Indonesia and others.