A new data website built in collaboration with Google shows the most popular “how-to” queries entered on the search engine.
Called “How To Fix a Toilet, And Other Things We Couldn’t Do Without Search”, the site is a visual essay by Xaquín G.V. created in collaboration with Google News Lab.
As site explains: “This essay aims to highlight how much we depend on search to know ‘how to do’ everyday things: those that existed before the internet, those we would actually ask our parents, family or friends.
“We have become so dependent on offloading, on relieving our brains from keeping certain basic, human information in storage, that we’ve forgotten how to do some fairly basic grown-up tasks.”
In addition to looking at things like household chores, the essay also covers the biggest “how-to” searches for love and dating.
As Xaquín says: “A good chunk of the most-searched ‘How Tos’ sound as if they were asked by someone between 12 and 21 (30 you may even say). They show the terribly sweet, innocent, romantic ignorance of our teens.”
The biggest searches include queries like “how to kiss”, “how to impress a girl”, “how to tell if a guy likes you” and “how to get a girlfriend”.
In fact, “how to kiss” was the second most-searched “how to” query of the past thirteen years, according to a separately-released list on the Google Trends Datastore called “Top How To’s on Google 2004 to 2017”.
Other dating-related searches on the list included “how to love”, “how to impress a girl” and “how to tell if a guy likes you”, all potential content ideas that could be used by dating platforms to capture traffic.
Check out the full list on the Google Trends Datastore here, and see the visual essay here.