Google’s Attempt to Encourage Indians to Vote this Voting Season

Search-giant ‘Google’ launched Politics and Elections portal that collates articles from various news agencies, resource pages of political parties and their YouTube channels, on 28th revamped it on Wednesday 26th.

As a post on Google’s official blog states, the portal will assist them to understand the electoral processes, keeping them abreast with the latest happenings of the Lok Sabha elections.

Indian political parties have realized the role of social media in wooing voters and have been trying all tips and tricks to provide on-the-go information for Lok Sabha 2014 elections. Google is trying to publicize this portal through existing subscribers and followers on Google India social media platforms like Google+, Twitter and Facebook.

An interesting feature on the portal is Trends, it shows the Google score and infographics of the top politicians and their parties. The Google score is date-wise and is based on the amount of search done for a person in the preceding 24-hours using Google search, YouTube and activity on Google+ associated with his/her name.

Google politics and election portal includes Pledge to vote featured tab where viewers can register themselves by taking a pledge to vote. This also has a section where Google has put up videos of celebrities like Amitabh Bachchan, Diya Mirza, Arjun Rampal and Sakshi Tanwar speaking about their reasons to vote.

The portal also features links to Google Hangouts with eminent political leaders along with various sections including schedule of leaders for the hangout, latest videos according to the most searched tags and a discussion page for the audience to post questions to the speakers followed by a hashtag (#). There were around 20,000 users participating live in the Google Hangout with Mr. Arun Jaitley.

Currently followed by 1370 followers on Google+, it aims to reach out to 200 million internet users in India through various mediums and portals. Now, in a country of 1.2 billion with 814 million registered users, an attempt to influence users to vote through the medium will be effective or not? We will know eventually. For more information, keep following us.