Gaurav Sabnis is popular !!

Was just curious to see how popular Gaurav Sabnis has become on the net since his IIPM expose. He was a popular blogger even earlier, and though I have no idea how popular he was before the expose, he certainly seems to have been climbing the popularity charts ever since. A search on Gaurav Sabnis on Google yields 110,000 results !!

Comparing that with net popularity of Indian celebrities, one can check that Mahatma Gandhi, Manmohan Singh & Aishwarya Rai have about 2 and a half million links each, Shahrukh Khan has about 1 and a half million. Surprisingly, India's most popular Bollywood actor ever, Amitabh Bachchan has just about 728,000 links against his name. Clearly he is not as popular among the netizens as Aishwarya or Shahrukh are. Cricketers Sachin, Sourav & Rahul are all around 400 - 550,000 links. Rahul Gandhi, a 'youth icon' has about 228,000 links against his name, or just about twice those against Gaurav Sabnis.

Indian celebrities are way behind Americans, though, thanks to better internet access in the West. Indeed, most of the American celebrities are pretty much 'world celebrities' as well and that has helped. In contrast, Indian celebrities are virtually unknown outside India.

George Bush has 112 million links... phew !! Guess you would find a lot of the Dubyaman jokes in all those links ;). Pop star Michael Jackson has 55 million links against his and Britney Spears has 14 million links against her name. David Beckham is about 10 times as popular as Sachin is on the net, with over 4.3 million hits against his name. Indian actors Aishwarya & Shahrukh are way behind their counterparts as well with Tom Cruise at about 14 million links & Julia Roberts at about 7.4 million.