Indians Search Mainly About Education: Google Report

(Before It's News)

Google has released a report  titled ‘Students on the Web’ which reveals over 60% of Indians aged 18-35 primarily use the online search to gather data about education & courses.

The education sphere is growing rapidly. Add to it, the young population of India & we get a potent mix of dynamic generation wanting to stay ahead in the race. Google India’s MD & VP Rajan Anandan says, “Our core objective behind compiling the study was to understand the impact internet is having on this young population with regard to education-related decision-making.”

Though the education related queries are on the rise by 46% Year on Year (YoY), students have shown preference only to the traditional courses with Information Technology & other vocational courses receiving 44% of the queries, followed closely by Engineering at 40% & remaining 16% queries were for Management courses.

While we could speculate students were searching for course & college details; the actual reasons behind the searches were revealed only after TNS Australia combined the online search patterns with offline surveys conducted in the prime metros of India.

Following are the actual reasons:

1. More than half (56%) of the 2,229 students surveyed, stated they wanted to know the job prospects after enrolling for the courses from any particular institute.
2. 49% of the students wanted to know who & how reputed the faculty members were. Only half of the students were interested in the actual course content.
3. While about 43% & 41% of the students were concerned about reputation of the institute & course fees respectively.

India is home to some of the top most educational institutions dating back almost a century. Such educational campuses have somehow lagged behind when it comes to publicizing their details online. Specific details like courses, teachers, campuses, hostel facilities are rarely available online. Ironically, most of such information is found on forums or third-party websites & applications that take the effort to collate the same. Hence students end-up searching online to find snippets of useful information.

We dug a little deeper & India’s most searched for terms, on both desktop and mobile platforms were as follows in order or priority:

Universities:

• Sikkim Manipal
• Amity
• Nirma
• Lovely Professional
• Sharda University

IIMs:

• IIM Ahmedabad
• IIM Bangalore
• IIM Indore
• IIM Calcutta
• IIM Kozhikode

IITs:

• IIT Delhi
• IIT Chennai
• IIT Kharagpur
• IIT Roorkee
• IIT Kanpur

While others are taking the effort, should colleges build-up their online reputation?

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2012-08-10 00:20:35

Source: http://www.watblog.com/2012/08/09/indians-search-mainly-about-education-google-report/

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