Strange Google searches (part 3)

Hitmen, Three Legged Dogs And Pregnant Men

Searching for a hitman.

A few months ago I published a post called 'Santa Claus, camper vans and Swedish girls' which discussed some of the weird searches made on Google every month. I then followed this up over Christmas with a post devoted entirely to Santa related searches on Google. As there are hundreds of weird Google searches made every month I thought it was time for another post along the same theme.

1) I’ll start off with a rather worrying search term.  This one is especially worrying when you consider that it gets 9,900 worldwide searches per month:

‘How do I hire a hitman?’

Even more worrying is the fact that this search term has a competition rating of 0.05* so whilst by no means the most competitive search term on Google, there nevertheless must be some businesses looking to advertise on this search term! What sort of businesses they might be I dread to think.

* Google assign all of their search terms a competition rating to allow advertisers to assess which search terms are the most popular with other advertisers and therefore the most competitive to advertise against.

Anyone who’s seen the movie Horrible Bosses will remember that they first began their attempts to kill their bosses by doing a similar search on Google, so maybe this search is inspired by Horrible Bosses and viewers of the movie are just curious as to what exactly Google returns for such a search. Hopefully, it’s nothing more sinister than that. Yes, I'm sure that's all it is...


2) Another rather worrying search term, this time for altogether different reasons, is the search term:

‘How can I get pregnant?’

That one gets a massive 24.9 million worldwide searchers every month! At first I thought, ‘Surely there can’t be that many women who don’t know how to get pregnant!’ but then I realised that probably what they actually mean is, ‘What steps can me and my partner take to increase our fertility and therefore increase my chances of getting pregnant?’ Either way though, it was quite a surprise to discover that almost 25 million ‘How can I get pregnant?’ searches are made by women* every month.

* Well, hopefully by women! With all the insane people in the world today though, you never know!

A pregnant man, pictured yesterday.

3) As mentioned in my earlier post you can get these figures from Google Keyword Planner (Update: Sadly, Google have now scrapped this feature), and another feature of Google Keyword Planner is that it also provides alternative search suggestions. There were quite a few unusual alternative suggestions for ‘How can I get pregnant?’which deserve a mention. The first of these was:

‘Can men get pregnant?’

That one actually gets 4,400 searches every month! Surely there can’t be over 4,000 people in the world every month who need to ask if men can get pregnant.



4) The next alternative suggestion was a clever one:

‘Can you get pregnant while pregnant?’

That one conjured up some weird images in my head and it’s an interesting concept. I can just imagine one baby popping out and telling the second baby, conceived a few months later, ‘Ha, ha! Beat you!  You’ve still got a few months to go!’ Rather surprisingly, ‘Can you get pregnant while pregnant?’ gets a massive 74,000 searches every month!


5) The final pregnancy related alternative suggestion which again was quite surprising was:

‘Can you get pregnant with clothes on?’

I know men can be full of patter sometimes, but surely no men has ever used the line, ‘h, don’t worry. It’s okay, you can’t get pregnant if you keep your clothes on.’ I mean, even if he was a patter merchant then surely it would make more sense to say it the other way round and bluff that taking your clothes off was the effective contraceptive method, rather than leaving your clothes on. Anyway, ‘Can you get pregnant with clothes on?’ gets 2,400 searches every month.

Tripod, a friendly three legged dog who used to live in Koh Pha Ngan.

6) That’s enough of the pregnancy related searches for now and I’ll round things off with one more weird search which 320 people search for every month:

‘How many legs does a dog have?’

Come on! Surely you don’t need to refer to Google to know how many legs a dog has? Everyone knows it’s three!

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If anyone has ever made a strange Google search of their own, then feel free to leave a comment.

You can find more weird Google searches below:
Weird Google searches (part 4)
Funny Google predictions quiz