Press Release

New Form One selection policy springs “KCPE” to top list of fastest rising searches in Kenya.

The Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) and the Kenya National Examination Council (KNEC) account for seven out of the 10 fastest rising searches made by Kenyan internet users, as revealed by Google Insights for Search in the month of January 2011.

Google has released its monthly search results using Google Insights, a tool that provides insights into Internet search trends, showing that exam-related searches were by far the most prominent in the list of fastest rising searches over the last 30 days.

The results reflect the concern over the new students selection policy recently introduced by the Ministry of Education, where the government secured more places in National schools for pupils from public primary schools. The new policy has seen 206,000 of the 746,107 pupils miss out on placement in High School.

Fastest Rising searches: Kenya  last 30 days

1. kcpe 2010
2. kcpe 2010 results
3. knec results
4. www.knec.ac.ke
5. kcpe results
6. kcpe
7. knec
8. uniplus
9. helb
10. kenyan jobs

Featuring at the bottom of the list are searches for jobs and financial aid. ‘helb’, coming in ninth position, offers loans for higher education students, suggesting that the internet is increasingly used for financial aid applications, scholarship searches, and other activities.

Web Search Interest: Kenya Police.

Around the globe, there was an upsurge in the search term ‘Kenya Police’ after news broke out that their website had been hacked and then, a few weeks later, media reports that Kenyan Police had killed suspected robbers at point blank range. In the latter incident, the Internal Security Minister came to the defence of the robbers, provoking a public debate led by civil society.

Zeitgeist Explained

Google reveals the internet “Zeitgeist” (German for “the spirit of the times”) through an exploration of the billions of search queries we receive each year. We also have several tools that give insight into global, regional, past and present search trends. Google Zeitgeist tools can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur over time. These tools are available year-round for you to play with, explore, and learn from.  You can create your own lists and rankings on www.google.com/zeitgeist

About Google.

Google’s innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google’s targeted advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia. For more information, visit http://www.google.com/africa and our Google Africa Blog. You can also follow Google’s Africa team on Twitter: twitter.com/googleafrica