WordTracker Questions Tool

God, I hate it when I cannot think of anything to write about. Usually the best thing to do is to start writing something at least and see where it takes you. Then I remembered a blog post about how good blog posts are trying to answer people’s questions. How do you know what people want to know about?

One way might be WordTracker’s Keyword Questions Tool.

Type a single word into the input box and the search will bring up the questions that people are asking ranked in order of popularity.   For example typing search brings a number of simple questions relating to searching the web. The data is taken from questions asked over a period of 140 days.

I have found that a lot of the questions were  simplistic but might prove useful if you were writing content for a web site. You could answer many of the questions in a single page.  I would like to know how the algorithm determines whether, if at all, similar questions are determined as being the same as there can be many ways of asking the same question.

There were some funny results returned in the long-tail, for example typing in cats brings up:

‘Cats who look like Hitler‘, more a query than question but bizarre nonetheless  and ‘What are the effects of marijuana on Cats‘ both of which were asked 4 times. For physics, ‘What is the physics of cheerleading paper?‘ and finally, for sweets, ‘Why would my rectum be itchy after eating sweets?‘ asked twice.

My mind boggles. Can you find more bizarre questions?