Bored at work? Type “why is” into Google, and up pops a list of the most common user questions beginning with that phrase, such as “why is the sky blue” and “why is my poop green.” Then try “what is,” “how do you,” “how to pronounce,” and so on, and before you know it you’ll be face deep in the greatest parlor game/time suck of the early twenty-first century. After Google Suggest debuted in 2008, it quickly became a handy tool for armchair psychologists looking to analyze our collective psyche. Among its revelations: we cheat on the New York Times crossword, we don’t know how to pronounce “gif,” and we mainly use the Internet to find song lyrics. Google Suggest tunnels into the far recesses of the soul, revealing humanity at its most innocent (“why am I me”), ugly (“I am extremely terrified of Chinese people”), and bizarre (“I like to tape my thumbs to my hands to see what it would be like to be a dinosaur”).
Baidu, the Chinese search engine, has a similar feature. Foreign Policy recently used it to develop a map of China by regional stereotype, while others have mined it to learn what Chinese think of foreigners from various nations. But that’s just a start. There’s a lot more Baidu can tell us about China’s search engine users, from their hopes and fears to their obsessions and consumer preferences. As I played around with the tool this week, a portrait of the average Baidu user started to emerge: a broke, sexually frustrated guy/girl who wants to become a teacher, buy a car, marry, and have a son (or, better yet, twins), if only he/she can get this damned wifi router to work.
Indeed, China has many problems, but the biggest headache plaguing Baidu users seems to be how to get wireless. Type in “怎么,” or “how,” and four of the top ten suggestions involve the setting up of routers and cracking of passwords. (For simplicity, the searches below are all translated from Mandarin.) Rivaling wifi for subject of greatest concern is pregnancy. “How do I make sure I have a son?” users ask, reflecting a common desire in China, especially under the government’s one-child policy. Women also want to know how to “get pregnant quickly” and have “dragon-phoenix twins,” or twins of opposite genders. Otherwise, users are most concerned with how to “buy stocks,” “apply eye-liner,” “download videos,” “reduce belly fat,” “repair a kidney,” and “catch pheasants,” slang for soliciting prostitutes.
Sex questions are popular—understandably so, given the relative dearth of sex education in China. (Plus, asking the Internet is less awkward than asking your teacher or mom.) The top “why” question among Googlers may be “why is the sky blue,” but Baidu users have a different primary concern: “Why is my semen yellow?” Runners up include “Why do I ejaculate so quickly?” and “Why don’t I have any semen?” They also pose questions they might be too shy to ask their partners, such as, “Why do girls go to the bathroom after sex?” You may have noticed these are all dude questions. It’s hard to say whether that’s because Chinese men have a disproportionately large number of sexual hang-ups, or because Baidu users are disproportionately male, or because China itself is disproportionately male. Evidence points to the latter two explanations: If you type in “I’m looking for,” “a wife” makes the list of top suggestions, but “a husband” does not.
Physical appearance is another perennial source of anxiety. Men search for ways to “grow taller” and “cure baldness,” while women ask how to “make my skin white,” “make my legs thinner,” and “make my face thinner.” “Am I handsome?” is the most common search about users’ appearance, followed by “I’m ugly,” “I’m very ugly,” and “What do I do if I’m ugly?” Insult to injury, the search results page is populated with photos of beautiful celebrities.
Baidu also catalogs the hopes and dreams of its users. The search term “My dream is” reveals the most-sought profession to be teacher, followed by doctor, designer, police officer, scientist, painter, astronaut, and soldier, in that order. And whatever their job, Baidu-ers want the trappings of a middle class lifestyle. The most common phrase that starts with “I want to buy” is “I want to buy a car.” A close second: “I want to buy a car but I have no money, what do I do?” After that, users are most interested in purchasing a phone, a house, a pigeon, and a gun.
Baidu users appear to be hopeless media addicts. A big chunk of search suggestions turn out to be titles of songs, movies, and TV shows, many of which users can stream online. Type in “I am,” and the suggestion box fills with variations on the talent show title “I Am a Singer.” Type “who,” and you are directed to the dating show “Who Can Be One in a Hundred?”, the talk show “Who’s Talking?”, the video game “Who’s the Mole?”, the movie Unexpected Love(its Chinese title translates as “Who Says We Can’t Love?”), the movie “Who Is the Real Hero?”, and the novel “Who Didn’t Have an Aimless Youth?” Baidu also suggests that users might be looking for the recent ad campaign “Who Can Represent KFC?” According to a spokesman for Baidu, there is no commercial element in the suggested search terms.
Politically sensitive terms do appear to be manipulated. Enter the word “Tiananmen” and you’ll see a short list of suggestions: “Tiananmen Square,” “Tiananmen photos,” “Tiananmen flag raising times,” and “I Love Beijing’s Tiananmen,” the title of a song from 1970. The terms “1988” and “1990” yield searches related to the lunar calendars of those years, but if you want to know when Spring Festival began in 1989, you’re out of luck. Likewise, “六四,” or “6/4,” shorthand for the massacre of June 4, 1989, produces no suggestions, while 六三 (“6/3”) and 六五 (“6/5”) reveal plenty. Chinese users appear to be turning to Google for answers to these sensitive questions instead. Type the Mandarin word for “why” into Google.com.hk, and the fourth most common search is “Why suppress Falun Gong?” Enter the word for “how” and suggestion number six is “How do I get over the Great Firewall?”
Baidu also tells us which phrases Chinese people want to say in other languages. If you type “How do you say in English,” you learn that the phrase most commonly searched for is 加油 or “add oil,” the Mandarin equivalent of “Go! Go!” Other terms that urgently require translation into English: “Shut up,” “wife,” “pollution,” “resume,” “brassiere,” and “milk powder.” The phrase that Chinese people most want to say in Japanese and Korean? “I love you.”
Some Baidu questions would only make sense to Chinese speakers. For example, a lot of users search for “Why is there no northern melon?” In Chinese, pumpkin is “southern melon,” watermelon is “western melon,” and white gourd is “winter melon,” which is a homophone for “eastern melon.” There is, in fact, a “northern melon,” but it’s a lot less common than the others. Other searchers want to know “Why is there no western capital?” for a similar reason, as Beijing is the “northern capital,” Nanjing is the “southern capital,” and Tokyo is the “eastern capital.”
But overall, Baidu users have a lot of the same questions and interests as Google users. The top suggestion on Google/Baidu for “I’m feeling”/”我感觉”is “I’m feeling blue”/“我感觉很难过.” Users of both search engines complain about their computers and demand to know what’s happening to their bodies. “Why does my hand sometimes tremble?” Baidu-ers ask, perhaps indicating one too many Baidu searches. In the end, most queries fall into the category of broad human experience. For example, what greater testament to our unity as a species than the fact that when you type “my balls”/“我的蛋”into Google/Baidu, the #1 suggestion is the same: “hurt”/“好疼.”