How many of you have ever Googled “how to fix a lightbulb”?
How about “how to boil an egg” or “how to make a paper aeroplane” or “how to tie a tie”? Even if you’ve never personally searched these terms, plenty of others have.
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Google might be an incredible tool for fighting terrorism, innovating into the future of artificial reality, and providing internet access to the world, but first and foremost its a search engine.
And people use it to search for their most basic questions to life, the universe, and everything.
According to a new visual essay from Xaquin GV in collaboration with Google News Labs, those are some of the most popular “How to…” Google searches around the world.
The essay compiles tonnes of data about the most popular ‘How to…’ searches and collates them in a pretty cool way.
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By GlobalDataFor example, here’s the most common things that people want to fix around the home. You can edit the data based on country. We’ve used United Kingdom since that’s where we’re based but every country has its own data.
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As you can see, we’re big on fixing things around the home in the UK. Compared to the median (that’s the little pink dashed lines around each item) we tend to Google how to fix these things a bit more than average.
The only thing we’re less keen on fixing than other people around the world is windows. Hmmm…
The most common things that people searched were how to fix walls, windows, and doors.
Probably because those are the most generic things that all people have in their houses around the world. Discounting those, Google have come up with a map of the based on the items that people are asking Google to help them fix. It’s pretty interesting stuff.
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But it’s not all about fixing things.
People use Google to search for how to do all kinds of things from cooking to being a professional.
Here’s a few more charts showing you how much people are searching for how to do stuff. Basic areas such as food, love, and professional life are all together.
The bigger the boxes, the more people have been searching these terms.
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There’s a tonne more data on the full site and we’d definitely advise you to check it out.
The data also goes into the ‘viral’ searches such as ‘How to make slime’ and ‘how to do the cup song’.
It’s pretty interesting how much we’ve all come to rely on Google for all this stuff.
If Google decided to delete all the answers to these questions, would society just fall apart?
