What? Where? Who? Why? Which? When? How? No this is not me being confused, its a list of WH question words we use daily. Each word has a different use:
| Word |
Use |
| When? |
Time |
| Where? |
Place |
| Who? |
Person |
| Why? |
Reason |
| How? |
Manner |
| What? |
Object/Idea/Action |
| Which? |
Choice of alternatives |
Yesterday I asked myself: What is the distribution of these words when people discuss (notice how I used a WH word there? – clever). Why? I asked myself, why is it interesting? Dunno, maybe just because its easy to find out. I opened Firefox and entered Omgili – the all mighty search engine for discussions. I used the graphs tool and entered the search keywords and here are the results:
| Place |
Word |
Percent of discussions |
Drop Delta |
| 1st |
What |
52% |
- |
| 2nd |
When |
42% |
10% |
| 3rd |
How |
39% |
4% |
| 4th |
Which |
30% |
9% |
| 5th |
Who |
28% |
2% |
| 6th |
Where |
25% |
3% |
| 7th |
Why |
21.5% |
3.5% |
Interesting I thought (really?). Here are some conclusions I drew:
- We (humans) are most interested in the Object/Idea/Action and least interested in the reason for it.
- After we understand what we are talking about we would like to know when the whole thing happened!
- Wow! we think – really? How ( In what manner) could it happen we are now interested in understanding.
- We then try to dig deeper and examine the choice of alternatives in the scene.
- Only then we ask who was involved in the whole thing.
- Now that we understand it better and just before the reason (least interesting) we are interested in knowing where it all happened.
I had more time on my hands so I decided to dig deeper – what is the distribution inside the discussions I asked? After all a discussion isn’t a text bulk, it is build out of three main parts – title, topic and replies. I used Omgili’s advanced search features and made three searches for each word, one for each discussion part (intitle:, intopic:, inreply:). Here are the results:
| Word |
Title % |
Topic % |
Replies % |
| What |
2.2% |
24% |
44% |
| When |
0.47% |
17.2% |
34% |
| How |
1.8% |
15% |
32% |
| Which |
0.35% |
11% |
23% |
| Who |
0.6% |
11% |
22% |
| Where |
0.5% |
8.5% |
20% |
| Why |
0.5% |
5.5% |
17.5% |
Notice that word occurrences can overlap between the different discussion sections.
My assumptions are that the title is a brief summation of the topic. The topic is the main subject of the discussion and the replies are circling the topic and the title.
What can we learn from the results?
- The same conclusion as from the first results, What is the most common question in all discussion sections – we really like to understand the Object/Idea/Action – it is very important to us.
- The How word (manner) has jumped to the second place when it comes to the titles – its almost 4 times more popular then the When (time) word that is in the overall second place. In essence people are asking more about the How in the summation of the discussion.
- The When word (time) does a comeback in the topic and replies. It means that when we are truly discussing something the time of subject is the second most important issue.
- The distribution of the rest of the words in the different sections correlates to the overall results we found – which is good!
I hope this little research helped you understand better what people are most interested in when they discuss an issue, and hopefully you will leverage this knowledge in some way (ideas are welcome in the comments section).
Thank you for reading,
Ran Geva |
A few weeks ago, I met some really interesting people who are literally Buzz Agents. I’m referring of course to some of the people behind Boston based 
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