From ‘how to’ to hair dye: our lockdown web searches

YouTube claims that people are watching educational videos more than ever as they search for new skills during the block.

Videos with titles like “how to” and “step-by-step” were viewed 65% more than this period last year, the platform said.

In the meantime, questions starting “how …” appear more and more in search engine trends.

At the same time, online shoppers are on the market for garden plants, lawn mowers, free weights and hair dyes.

“There are many questions about how to do it,” said Nalina Eggert, an SEO expert at the BBC.

“How to make hand sanitizer, face masks and bread, how to cut hair.”

Nalina has seen a dramatic increase in questions on grammar, punctuation, fractions, human biology and history since the closure of UK schools – as well as the specific medical questions surrounding Covid-19, as if the virus can be caught. twice and if it affects pets.

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Then there are more serious research trends: furlough questions, R number and specific medical questions for Covid-19 symptoms and prognosis.

“There’s also a much higher search than usual for sympathy cards,” added Nalina.

“It’s the best I’ve ever been. People are trying to buy them, but the most related research is what to write in them. Imagine that they can be people who have never had to send one before. My heart turns to them.”

And on a lighter note, there is a question that appears in Nalina’s charts every Friday.

“‘What time can you buy alcohol in Scotland?’ it’s a normal Friday search. We all have to mark the weekend somehow. “

(They are between 10 and 22 – you are welcome).

Free weights and rolls of paper

Redbrain is an e-commerce platform. The company has access to millions of purchases research data and how they translate into sales.

The best shopping searches in the UK in March and April included free weights, lawn mowers, plants, seeds and hair dyes.

In March, Redbrain recorded over 2.1 million searches for free weights, up nearly 4000% from February’s activity. There were over a million of them back in April.

There were also one or two notable short-lived trends: in March the most sought-after item was the toilet roll with nearly five million searches … and in April there were 2.1 million searches for women’s underwear.

“It’s easy to think that the world has stopped and life has been put on hold, but our data tells a different story,” said Redbrain’s head of growth, Alistair Campbell.

“We are all living similar experiences and buying many of the same things at the same time.

“Is the nation establishing itself in the new” normal “? At the moment it is difficult to say, but intuitions about purchases and volumes certainly show that online commerce is evolving and in good health.”

Dizzying growth

The increase in Internet use during the block has been “unbelievable” to observe, said John Graham-Cumming, technology director of the website security company Cloudflare.

“There is a natural growth that you would expect to see over time – as Internet connections in people’s homes improve, people do more things online.

“But in 2020 we saw a year of growth in three months.”

But not everyone uses the net to find out how to fix their hair – Cloudflare noted that part of that “growth” was an increase in low-level cyber crime.

This is commonly in the form of small-scale distributed denos-of-service attacks (DDOS) – when a website is flooded with Internet traffic to try to take it offline.

“It’s vandalism stuff,” said Graham-Cumming. “It is often done by students – we typically see an increase in these attacks during college holidays.”