Asking Search Engines Real Questions? You Are Not Alone, It’s Normal

Sometimes when I start typing a new query in the Firefox search field that will initiate search on Google for something useful for me, I watch the autosuggestions in fascination wondering exactly how and why people would search for all sorts of crazy things that Google claims we search for. I guess that full access to Google search stats could have left me fascinated and occupied for months, frequently giggling over some of the most curious questions people ask the search engine.

Now really, do you ask Google questions? Do you sometimes think that Google (or any other search engine of your choice) is something of a human being that will understand your needs and offer a convenient and helpful answer on exactly where you should go to read the information you need? Of course it may sound pretty strange but stats prove that people do ask search engines questions – and expect answers instead of some SEO-regulated SERPs.

Unfortunately I have not seen such stats for Google but Russian Yandex has recently revealed their own stats (in Russian) regarding search queries that are formulated as questions – and the publication definitely proves that more and more people treat their search engines as humans that could understand their thoughts and provide convenient solutions.

In fact, out of 100 million queries processed by Yandex daily, roughly 3 million (or 3%) are various questions that users pose expecting an answer. And the share of such queries is growing steadily every year as people begin to treat search engines more like helpful friends.

In Russia there are three questions that people keep asking more or less regularly – about 6 thousand times every day: ‘how to lose weight’, ‘how to download free music from Vkontakte’ (the largest Russian social network that also happens to enable file sharing so many users engage in pirating music over there), and ‘what is love’. And where for the first two questions I can easily imagine numerous how-to articles popping up in search results instructing users on exactly what they should do to achieve the results they want, I can’t imagine any answer on the eternal question of what love is – especially something people might want to get in an online search engine.

At that, while people do seem to take a search engine for a real companion in a conversation, good news is that people are still practical so they ask questions that they will likely have plenty of answers in those very how-to articles. In half of all the questions they ask things starting with ‘How…’ followed by ‘Where…’ with 17.5%. And only in 1.6% of all the questions people are looking for answers to questions like ‘Why…’.

But even those practical questions still have all the chances of being very tricky for search engines as people want to know all sorts of strange things from ‘When will spring finally begin?’ to ‘When do cactuses sing?’ And I guess that people working on semantic search technologies will never be left without funding while people keep asking questions that only a human could understand and answer properly – after reformulating the question properly in a traditional search engine.