TNN

New Delhi, May 7: Behind the backdrop of the big battle of ballots, Congress and the BJP have intensely fought another war -- in cyberspace -- over the past two months.

With details filtering out of the work stations, it is evident that on the web, the antagonists have indeed fought a ding-dong, heart-stopping fight, never lapsing into a predictable one-sided affair.

The Advani campaign, even the rival camp grudgingly admits, took the Obama route by following up the challenger's memoir with a smart, sleek website -- www.lkadvani.in.

The well-designed site, the Congress camp suspects, has been sustained by a `massive budget'.

Congress, for its part, focused on information and easy navigability of its site. Its strong point, according to party functionary V P Singh, was "light pages leading to quick loading and an extremely simple interface".

Keeping in view the slow connectivity in most parts of the country, the party had decided not to put up a decorative and heavy site.

From the third week of March, the two websites entered a fierce phase of man-eat-man kind of confrontation over visitors and hits. Still, to their surprise, the Congress backroom boys noticed the distinct lead that the Advani site maintained.

Perhaps the Advani site would have continued to enjoy its edge but for a camp-follower's admission to the media that a tie-up with Google had led to the success of the BJP's cyber campaign. With the site coming as an ad for any major portal or website, net surfers had no choice but to visit it.

"While we found that the popularity of the Congress site was gradually increasing and stabilising at higher and higher levels, we still remained behind the Advani and BJP sites," Singh candidly admitted on Wednesday.

According to him, the Advani site raised the frequency of ads at every hint of the Congress net campaign catching up.

However, on the eve of every polling day, the Congress website overtook the rival site. Quoting the world website monitoring site ALEXA (www.alexa.com), Congress said that immediately prior to polling in each of the phases, its site surged with a corresponding dip in the interest in the rival site.

Singh claimed that what had tipped the scale in favour of the Congress site was the rush of young visitors.

"Placing multiple advertisements on internet portals and paying for each click can only ensure that a large number of net users visit the site but cannot ensure their loyalty," he told a media conference.