Ulma Haryanto – Noordin M. Top was apparently on a lot of Indonesian's minds this year, as he topped the overall list of search terms used in the country in 2009 on search engine Yahoo.
The pandemic that wasn't – swine flu – and the country's worst natural disaster this year – the West Sumatra quake – came in second and third, respectively, according to a recently released statement by Yahoo! Indonesia.
"The list was made by analyzing search queries based on a number of factors, including absolute volume and growth versus previous periods," said Peter Joblin, senior communications manager for Yahoo! Southeast Asia.
Also in the top five were the feared apocalypse in 2012 and earthquakes in general.
Meanwhile, the top question asked by Indonesian users on Yahoo! Answers is: "Why is the Internet so pricey in Indonesia?" The second most popular question was on symptoms for breast cancer, while the third was how to behave when meeting the in-laws for the first time.
For news searches, Michael Jackson topped the list, followed by Manohara and Japanese porn star Maria Ozawa. Megan Fox topped the celebrity search list, followed by Manohara and Michael Jackson.
Yahoo! Indonesia also reported that mobile Internet users are on the rise in the country. "Indonesia has one of the highest rates of mobile penetration in Southeast Asia," Joblin said. "Sports and celebrities topped the list of mobile searches," he said.
The top mobile searches were the premier league, local celebrity Sarah Azhari, Aburizal Bakrie's PT Bumi Resources (a coal mining company) and Angelina Jolie. The top five football teams searched for were Manchester United, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Arsenal and Chelsea.
According to a September report by Web browser company Opera, the number of Indonesians using Opera's mobile Internet browser more than doubled from September 2008.
The report also revealed that Indonesia is the only country where the number of unique users of the Yahoo! Web site exceeded that of Google.
The most popular Web site for mobile-web users in Indonesia is the social network site Facebook, followed by Friendster, which is another social networking site. Yahoo! was third, up one from last year, followed by download site Waptrick and Google.