'Seh Daeng' most popular on internet search engines last year

By The Nation

The most popular searches for people on the Internet in Thailand last year were for "Seh Daeng" with over 700,000 hits, while "Thaksin" came in at No 4 with 400,000 hits, according to TrueHits.

The Internet Innovation Research Centre's chief technical officer, Piya Tanthawichian, who operates TrueHits, said there were about 20 million Internet users in Thailand last year, an increase of about 20 per cent from the previous year.

There were 1.82 million UIPs - Unique Internet Protocols, the unique number that every commuter connected to the Internet is assigned - an increase of around 32 per cent from 2009.

Meanwhile, daily page views in 2010 were about 125 million, up 6 per cent from 2009.

In 2010, the total hits of access to the TrueHits' 11,500 members were about 45.86 billion, up 6.77 per cent from 2009. The top five website categories that people accessed last year were entertainment, games, peoplesocial, news media, and shopping.

Chat was still the most popular online activity among Thai Internet users last year. And Nokia was the IT brand with the most popular key word, with 13 million searches. Nokia was followed by iPad/iPhone with 4.68 million searches, and Samsung with 2.71 million searches.

The top five "people searches" were for "Seh Daeng" (MajGeneral Khattiya Sawasdiphol, who was fatally shot during the redshirt rally last May); Annie Brook (who hit the headlines after revealing that famous singer "Film" Rattaphum Tohkongsap was the father of her child); Phraewa (who was perceived as showing no remorse for causing a fatal road accident);

Thaksin (Shinawatra); and Tono of "The Star" reality show. Piya said these were hot topics with human interest.

"During April and May last year, news websites had a lot of increased traffic due to people monitoring the political situation and consuming news online," said Piya.

According to TueHits.net Web awards 2010, sanook.com was still the most popular website in Thailand followed by kapook.com, mthai.com, dekd.com, and exteen.com respectively.

The Nation's oknation.net, a blog site service provider, was ranked at No 24 among popular websites in Thailand last year.

-- The Nation 2011-05-21

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