Things the world wants to know how to do
Google published its annual Zeitgeist survey a couple of weeks ago, which tracks the year’s most popular searches in different countries. It breaks them down by category—people, movies, shopping, etc.—and for most countries, one of the categories is “How to…?” We took the top result for each country that had this category and translated them where necessary. (In a couple of cases, we weeded out spurious results caused by quirks of language.)

Google published its annual Zeitgeist survey a couple of weeks ago, which tracks the year’s most popular searches in different countries. It breaks them down by category—people, movies, shopping, etc.—and for most countries, one of the categories is “How to…?” We took the top result for each country that had this category and translated them where necessary. (In a couple of cases, we weeded out spurious results caused by quirks of language.)
There’s some interesting variation. The most pressing challenges for many nationalities are kissing or slimming, but the Japanese are evidently obsessed with making their cellphones last longer, Colombians with cupcakes, and Russians with not being quite so mean to each other.
Most popular Google searches beginning “How to…”
Argentina: how to update Facebook