Northumbria Advanced Motorcyclists is run entirely by volunteers. Like everyone, our scarcest resource is time. We try to ensure that the articles we write, our workshops, the efforts of our training, social and marketing teams, are as useful or helpful to other motorcyclists as possible.
Finding out what concerns the biking community is key to ensuring that these efforts are relevant, as well as a great way to generate ideas for future articles.
Search Questions
To that end (and, in truth, partly because I enjoy doing this sort of thing when the days are too cold and short to be out on my bike) I looked at the at the questions that have been entered into Google’s search box.
Using a keyword research tool, it is possible to extract details of past Google searches. In this case, I wanted to produce a list of every search worldwide containing a question word (who, how, what, why, when) combined with any of the words ‘motorcycle’, ‘motorbike’, etc.
I tidied the resulting data set to consolidate regional spelling variations (e.g. instances of ‘color’ were replaced with ‘colour’). This led to a list of 4522 unique search questions related to motorcycling.
For a bit of extra fun, and in order to visualize common themes amongst the questions, I created the following word cloud from the full list of questions. The word cloud itself was created using R (a statistical computing language), removing ‘stop words’ (a, the, it, on, etc.), the question words themselves and the motorcycle keywords (‘motorcycle’, ‘motorbike’, etc.).
The remaining words are scaled according to the frequency with which they appeared amongst the 4522 search questions. The resulting word cloud was exported to Adobe Illustrator and rearranged and recoloured to produce the following image.
Download Motorcycle Question Art
The Strangest Questions
So, what were the strangest questions that people asked?
Looking through all the questions and picking those that were the most unexpected, a bit weird or funny, I selected the following list. These phrases are listed in random order (not based on search frequency):
- how to wear motorcycle booties
- motorcycle umbrella how to install
- how to make a motorcycle
- how to ride a motorcycle uphill
- how to build a motorcycle rocking horse
- how to build your own chopper motorcycle
- how to make a motorcycle baby cake
- how do you bunny hop a motorcycle
- how to install speakers on motorcycle
- how to pick up a girl on a motorcycle
- how to transport a motorcycle in a pickup truck
- how to pick up a motorcycle like a girl
- how to get financed for a motorcycle with bad credit
- how tall should I be to ride a motorcycle
- how to make your scooter sound like a motorcycle
- how to ride a motorcycle around a roundabout
- how to determine your head shape for a motorcycle helmet
- how to make a motorcycle out of baby stuff
- how do I buy wrecked motorcycles from insurance companies
- how to tie down a Goldwing motorcycle on a trailer
- how to put a motorcycle engine in a golf cart
- how to use a floor jack to lift a motorcycle
- how to start off slow on a motorcycle
- how to ride a motorcycle and not die
- how to go over speed bumps on a motorcycle
- how to make a Darth Vader motorcycle helmet
- how to get a broken key out of a motorcycle ignition
- how to get a girl to ride on your motorcycle
- who made the batman motorcycle
- why wear chaps when riding motorcycle
- what happens when you hit a pothole on a motorcycle
- why are motorcycles called crotch rockets
- should I ride a motorcycle when pregnant
- what to do when you get pulled over on a motorcycle
- what size shed for motorcycle
- what is bogging on a motorcycle
- what does a bell on a motorcycle mean
- what is the front of a motorcycle called
- where to park motorcycle in apartment
- how to ride a motorbike fast
- how to make a motorbike out of fondant icing
- what does hiss mean on a motorbike
Comments
If you have answers to any of these questions, please let me know! Please send your comments to email.