What’s the weirdest thing you’ve googled ‘for research’?

@wattpad_to_print OP

3mo ago

My browser history is a crime board waiting to be misunderstood. Last week alone: 'how long does a body float', 'can you survive a fall into a haystack', and 'average price of a Victorian funeral'. Tell me your most unhinged search bar confession so I feel less alone on whatever watchlist we're on.

11 comments

@nocturne_writes3mo ago

I once spent a full afternoon researching 'how fast does formaldehyde decompose a wedding ring' because a side character was an embalmer who pocketed jewelry. The forums I ended up on were genuinely a community of working morticians who were lovely and answered in horrifying detail. I now know more about embalming than any novelist should and the ring subplot got cut in revision anyway.

@plotholes_anon2mo ago

Embalmer forums are a goldmine and I will not be taking criticism. Mine was 'can a person be allergic to their own sweat' for a thriller, which turned out to be a real condition called cholinergic urticaria. The real problem is my husband saw the search and quietly asked if I was okay.

@kovac_ink2mo ago

Historical fiction here, so my unhinged is period-specific. I searched 'medieval people teeth how bad actually' expecting horror and learned that pre-sugar diets meant they were often better than ours. The genuinely cursed follow-up was 'what did poor people use as toilet paper 1300s' and I regret to inform you the answer is moss, leaves, or in cities, a communal sponge on a stick.

@first_draft_dani2mo ago

The sponge on a stick has rewritten my whole understanding of the past, thank you for that nightmare. Mine is gentler. I googled 'do bees recognize human faces' for a beekeeper character and the answer is a qualified yes, they can be trained to. I built an entire emotional beat around a hive 'remembering' the dead beekeeper's daughter and it's now the part beta readers cry at.

@the_red_pen2mo ago

My worst was a two hour rabbit hole into 'how to pick a handcuff with a bobby pin' followed immediately by 'is it legal to own handcuffs'. The second search was me panicking that the first one had flagged something. For the record the picking video was disappointingly easy and ruined the tension in my own scene, so I had my character fail at it instead.

@pulp_priya2mo ago

I write crime so my history is basically a confession in advance. The one that actually got me side-eyed at a cafe was 'how much chloroform to knock someone out' which, by the way, is a myth. It takes about five minutes of constant application, not a soaked rag for two seconds. Every thriller you've ever read lied to you and now I can't unsee it.

@seaglass_stories2mo ago

Nothing as dramatic as bodies, but I lost a whole evening to 'what does a drowned cathedral smell like' for a flooded city setting. Google had no idea what I wanted. I ended up emailing an actual cave diver who explained the difference between stagnant freshwater rot and saltwater brine, and that one paragraph reply did more for the atmosphere than the three books I'd skimmed.

@deadline_dodger1mo ago

I had to look up 'how long can you survive in a chest freezer' for a locked-room setup and the answer depends entirely on whether it's airtight, which sent me into freezer engineering specs at 2am. The most useful thing I found was that most modern freezers are NOT airtight by design precisely so this doesn't happen. Killed my plot, saved hypothetical lives.

@wattpad_to_printOP1mo ago

The freezer engineering detour is exactly the kind of spiral I started this thread to celebrate. I'll add one more confession since you've all been so generous: I once searched 'can you hear someone screaming from inside a car trunk' and then, realizing how that looked, typed 'for a novel' into the same search bar as if Google was a jury I could plead to.

@foggy_chapters1mo ago

The 'for a novel' addendum is a universal tic and it protects no one. I do the same thing out loud, alone, in my apartment. My contribution: 'how to dispose of a piano' because a character inherits one and hates it. Turns out it's genuinely hard and expensive, pianos are basically furniture-shaped landfill, and that frustration became the funniest scene in the book.

@midnight_edits1mo ago

Mine is embarrassing because it's so mundane and yet I searched it forty times: 'how do you actually tie a canoe to a car roof'. My character is competent and outdoorsy and I am a person who has never touched a canoe. I watched so many videos that the algorithm now thinks I'm an avid paddler and only shows me kayak gear reviews.