Tourism: Kerala beats Taj in Google Search Trends for 2012

Kerala, popularly known as 'God's own country', has edged out Taj Mahal to become India's topmost travel destination in the Google's search trends for this year.

Kerala's famous hill station on the Western Ghats 'Munnar' also figures on the list of "Top 10" Indian destinations on Google's Zeitgeist site showing search trends from around the world.

According to a state tourism department release today, Kerala stood at number position and Taj Mahal at number two followed by Wagah Border, Vaishno Devi shrine and Amarnath temple.

The search trends in the travel category released by Google, showed Munnar at ninth rank, followed by the Mumbai's Gateway of India.

Kerala Tourism Minister A P Anil Kumar termed the two listings for Kerala, including the number one spot, as a 'great encouragement' for the state.

"Kerala is a leader in online promotional activities in Tourism. We are one of the first government establishments to make use of the Internet to reach out to the world," he said.

"Kerala Tourism is a leader in coming up with innovative ideas. We have also engaged social media networks like Facebook and Twitter for promoting destinations," said Kerala Tourism Secretary Suman Billa.

Kerala Tourism website (www.keralatourism.org) attracts over 250,000 unique visitors every month. The Kerala Tourism gets around 6 million views every year on YouTube.

Google's Zietgeist, which covers all search categories, answers the question of what the world searched for in a particular year.

The trending for the year means search queries with the highest amount of traffic over a sustained period compared to the previous year. Most searched are the search queries with the largest volume of searches.

Zeitgiest also contains highest searched subjects and topics.

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