Air Pollution is among highest searched word in India: Study

Indian people are rigorously asking Google to help them know what air pollution is and how can it be controlled or prevented.

With increasing air pollution in various cities of India, the Indians seem to be more cautious. This is evident from the fact they searched 'air pollution' about two lakh times in October and November 2019.

Air pollution indoor as well as outdoor is a serious threat to environmental health issues. For the past few years, the quality of air has consistently been worsening which is a major concern for Indians now. Following the same, SEMrush recently conducted a study on Air Pollution in India and the data from Oct 2018 to Nov 2019 has been taken into consideration.

According to the results, India is proactively searching about air pollution and related terms on Google. Questions like 'what is air pollution', 'what causes air pollution' and 'how to control air pollution' are the top searches made on Google by the citizens of the country. Along with these questions, there are several keywords relevant to air pollution which are being rapidly searched by internet users. The keyword 'air pollution' has over two lakh average search per month. It the top searched keyword followed by 'causes of pollution' and 'effects of pollution' being the second and the third most searched keyword respectively.

The most interesting facts revealed by the SEMrush case study are the total number of air pollution-related searches and the growth rate of such searches at different intervals of time. The total air pollution-related searched made in the last 12 months is more than 4 lakhs. And there is a drastic increase in the growth rate of such searches from 73 percent in Sep-October to 968 percent in Sep-Nov. Especially the search growth rate for 'air quality index' has up-surged from 647 percent to 5647 percent during the same period.

On the other hand, air pollution is a buzz on Twitter as well. From Aug 2019 to Nov 2019, there have been 7817 tweets related to air pollution on this social media platform. It is not surprising to find that most of the tweets on this topic are negative, counting to 54 percent whereas only 21 percent tweets were positive and 24 percent were neutral.

The Air Quality Index (AQI) of major cities such as Delhi, Gurgaon, Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Varanasi, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, and several other regions in North India have been in the range of poor to severe. In the month of October- November, the haze in Delhi had led to 'health emergency'.