From New Straits Times
By : Chok Suat Ling
KUALA LUMPUR: Pop princess Datuk Siti Nurhaliza Tarudin is no longer tops in the hearts and minds of Malaysians, at least according to searches on Google Malaysia.
Datuk Seri Dr Chua Soi Lek, and a host of other personalities have overtaken her as the subject of searches of famous personalities conducted on the website google.com.my this year.
Last year, Siti Nurhaliza was the most popular search, even more than notorious US socialite Paris Hilton and pop star Britney Spears.
Paris and Britney have also fallen out of this year’s top ten list, which now has Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim at the No. 1 spot, followed by US President-elect Barack Obama, opposition leader Lim Kit Siang, former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Olympic badminton medallist Datuk Lee Chong Wei, teen idol Miley Cyrus, Chua, Siti Nurhaliza, Hannah Montana and DAP politician Tony Pua.
Chua, MCA deputy president and former health minister, is also the only personality who made it to the top ten list of Google News searches.
Google Malaysia’s 2008 year-end hot searches list released yesterday also showed Youtube, Yahoo and Friendster in the first, second and third places respectively for overall top searches.
The rest on the top ten list for overall top searches are “Utusan”, “Mp3″, “Google”, “Games”, “Map”, “Lyrics” and “MySpace”.
Terengganu and Pulau Tioman topped the list for destination searches, and a strong growth for social networking and video sites like Facebook, and Internet news portals like Malaysiakini and Malaysian Insider was also registered.
The fastest rising searches this year were “Malaysiakini”, “Facebook”, “Harakah”, “TV3″, “Malaysia Today”, “Rapidshare”, “blogspot”, “YouTube”, “themalaysianinsider”, and “Beijing 2008″.
Perodua Nautica and Toyota Rush beat Proton MPV, Proton BLM, Honda City, Proton Saga, Grand Livina, Honda Accord, MyVi and Honda Civic in the volume of car model searches.
For top Google News local searches, a company Ibiden Asia, came up tops, followed by “Anwar Ibrahim”, “Datuk Seri”, “Olympic badminton results”, “Chua Soi Lek”, “Malaysian election results”, “Malaysia budget 2009″, “Malaysia new cabinet”, “Permatang Pauh election”, and “Gamuda Bhd”.
The most “googled” blogs were Dr Mahathir’s Chedet, followed by Anwar ibrahim, Anil Netto, Raja Petra, Susan Loone, Tony Pua, Rockybru, Paul Tan, Kenny Sia and Jeff Ooi.
Besides Terengganu and Pulau Tioman, top destination searches were Genting Highlands, Port Dickson, Malacca, Penang, Pulau Perhentian, Bukit Tinggi, Sunway Lagoon and Selangor.
Under Google Insights for Search, which allows people to compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories and time frames, a large increase was noted for the word “murah”, “warehouse” and “sale”. Terms like “recession” and “financial crisis” also saw significant spikes in search volume.
The list, according to Google Inc, represented the zeitgeist or “spirit of the times” for Malaysia. It is calculated by looking at the aggregation of the most popular and fastest-rising search queries being typed into the google.com.my search box.
