What the World is looking for

Reading Time: 3 mins

Large scale sociological research has never been this easy. Google’s search suggestions are based on what people search for on their search engine. This can be a fairly good reflection of what people are currently interested in, making it a powerful tool for research. (You could also save these results and look at them over time to see trends in these preferences, but that’s a topic for a different day..)

So, to learn what questions people are asking about Andre Agassi, just go to Google’s search box and type “Why is Andre Agassi” and wait for a second. (People want to know why he’s famous, why he’s bald, why he broke up with Brooke Shields, and why he wore a wig.)

Or, to see what India is interested in learning, just type “How to” on google.co.in and you’ll find – perhaps to your surprise – that Indians want to learn:

how to kiss
how to lose weight
how to download youtube videos
how to get pregnant (clearly less important than kissing well)

On the other hand, the UK wants to know

how to make loom bands (but why?)
how to lose weight
how to make pancakes (which may not be a good idea if you want to lose weight)
how to write a cv

The US wants to learn

how to train your dragon 2 (that’s the animated film)
how to tie a tie
how to hard boil eggs
how to lose weight

What’s clear is that people of all three nations have losing weight as one of their top 4 priorities, but vary quite a bit in their preferences otherwise.

At Gramener, we put together a compilation of the search results for common questions.

There are several nuggets in here. The world is generally curious about why Salman Khan is not married, and why he’s not in jail. But the preference and order of questions varies from country to country.

Focus on inventions vary a lot across regions too. Indians are the only ones who seem concerned about who invented zero. For the British, football comes ahead of the Internet and Electricity.

You can explore these are more at https://gramener.com/search/

If you find any interesting query patterns please let us know either in the comments below or via Twitter. We’ll add it here.

Gramener Inc

Gramener Inc is a data analytics and storytelling company that extracts insights from big data using state-of-the-art technology and shares them as stories for easy consumption. Gramener helps business users accelerate decision making.

Next Making Public Service BIG with #BigData »

Previous « Data science news

View Comments

Ajeet says:

28/11/2014 at 5:15 am

I tried searching “lyrics of” in indian and uk sites of google. Interestingly, “lyrics of desi kalakaar” is sought-after in both nations. Similarly, I checked AU site for “lyrics of” and found that 2-3 entries are common between AU and UK.

Just expand this concept to many nations and you know the most famous songs, and which songs have crossed which national boundaries. Cool !!!