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What will you do if your toilet broke? Reread the instruction book or call customer service? No, you will type “how to fix a toilet” in the search bar of Google.
By working with interactive visual data journalist Xaquin G.V., the tech giant's News Lab created a website based on data culled from users’ searches on "how to" do things to show what they want to fix based on their locations.
Graphic objects on the website such as light bulb, washing machine, fridge and door get larger or smaller when you input a particular region.
The most-searched “how to fix” in China is the window as the “most broken” object in the US is the door.
Some data revealed bizarre facts that stir people’s imagination. Xaquin discovered two completely irrelevant searches, “how to fix a toilet” and “how to use chopsticks,” that have very similar trends in Google’s data.
The gif below shows how he pictures the scenario.
Besides "how to fix" stuff, users are also eager to get answers to questions that they are too shy to ask a friend. Searches like “how to kiss”, “how to get pregnant” and “how to tell if a guy likes you” are the most popular searches.
Other common “how to” searches include “how to boil an egg”, “how to tie a tie” and “how to lose weight.”
Xaquin also indicates that some people tend to ask the same questions around the same time each year. For example, the search “how to ask someone to prom” reaches the peak every year around April during the prom season in the US.
How Chinese netizens get answers
Apart from Baidu and Sogou, dominant search engines in China, Chinese netizens like to use specific online platforms to ask questions as well. Here are two examples.
1. Zhihu (知乎)
"What is it like to have a beautiful girlfriend?"
Zhihu, or “Do you know”, is a Chinese Q&A online platform launched in 2011, where registered users can ask questions in the community and invite certain users to answer.
Most-asked questions on Zhihu is not “how to” but “what is it like”, such as “what is it like to work in the United Nations” or “what’s it like to have a beautiful girlfriend”.
As a highly interactive platform, Zhihu becomes the birthland of many hot Internet topics due to the massive amount of questions and answers on its platform.
2. Baidu Experience (百度经验)
"How to make cookies?"
The platform is released by Baidu in 2010 to solve the “how to” questions raised by Chinese netizens. Contributed by users, each article on the Baidu Experience works like an instruction book, which provides the materials and procedures for questions like “how to make cookies”.
A similar product of Chinese tech giant is Baidu Knows (百度知道), a Q&A platform released in 2005.
(CGTN)
