Here are Baidu's 'weirdest' searches of 2017 so far

We’ve all seen those memes of bizarre, hilarious, and sometimes just a bit icky Google queries – after all, human curiosity is a wondrous thing capable of spewing forth unexpected, and often amusing, questions.

In China, we’ve got the search giant Baidu, and it’s got some equally strange and funny queries to offer. According to China Daily, Baidu has looked into its search data and compiled a list of the top weirdest search queries of 2017. Whether it’s something you’d want to admit or not, perhaps some of these are questions you’ve found yourself pondering in the past:

1. Where do farts go when you hold them in?

2. Why can’t I keep myself from popping my pimples?

3. Why do I like singing in the shower?

4. Why is housing in school districts so expensive even though educational backgrounds aren’t valuable?

5. Why can’t I resist smelling my hands after picking at my feet?

6. What should I do if my daughter looks ugly?

7. If I fly to America, will the time difference extend my lifespan by a day?

8. When using a squatting toilet, how can I avoid the splashes caused by the excrement dropping into the toilet basin?

9. Why are people disgusted by two men holding hands but not by two women?

10. If I place a bowl of blood next to my bed, will the mosquitoes still bite me at night?

11. Why am I so in love with my husband?

12. Why don’t my own snores wake me up?

Some silly, some endearing, some stomach-turning, and some just a bit disturbing. To some of these, Baidu was able to provide surprising but satisfactory answers. For example, it turns out that farts held in eventually becomes absorbed through the intestinal wall and into the bloodstream, and eventually will leave through your mouth. It makes sense that if you won’t let it go out one end, it’ll try the other.

While some of these questions seem merely fodder for jokes, others may prompt deeper questions. The question about same-sex hand-holding may lead to greater questions about the varying attitudes towards LGBTQ communities and rights in China.

Baidu hosts 95 percent of Chinese internet users as the largest Chinese website and receives over five billion searches a day, so whether these questions make us laugh or prompt us to reflect we can certainly be sure that these top 12 questions came from a very, very large source pool – and it seems a lot of people are concerned about holding in farts...

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