The live quiz show app HQ Trivia has recently taken off as the hottest social app around. However, the game is notoriously tough to play. While its 12 rounds of rapid-fire questions begin fairly easy, they get harder with each question.
This hasn’t stopped players from trying to cheat the system in hopes of winning the cash jackpots at the end.
According to an Inverse analysis of Google Trends data, HQ players have been trying to cheat on questions by Googling their way through them. Unfortunately (and fortunately for HQ), it’s tough to cheat without eventually running out of steam.
One reason for this is that each question is set to a 10-second countdown clock, which makes it hard to cheat on even for the fastest Googlers among us. Another factor, as demonstrated in the following graphs, is that simply searching for a term will not necessarily produce an answer from the multiple choices presented.
Basically, if you don’t know the answer, you’ll most likely be eliminated before the 12 questions are up. The game is played twice per day, at 3 p.m. and 9 p.m. EST, which makes the following Google Trend charts especially obvious proof that thousands players are cheating.
During Sunday night’s game, at around 9:08 p.m. Easternastern, the word Cymraeg up on the charts. Probably not coincidentally, the meaning of the word was asked during the game. It’s the Welsh word for “Welsh,” for the record. It’s the Welsh word for “Welsh,” for the record.
Another question from Sunday night’s game, where i, where it was asked which of the answers is a North American FL short for the NFL. One of the choices, CFL, short for the Canadian Football League, peaked in search at 9:08 p.m.
During Monday’s 3 p.m. stream, the app asked what the word Herculaneum refers to. According to Google, the term’s search peaked at 3:08. Herculaneum is an ancient Roman city close to Pompeii that was also destroyed when the volcano Vesuvius erupted, which would take most of us a couple of minutes to figure out.
Finally, during today’s 3 p.m. game, a question pertaining to our solar system’s “hottest planet” was asked. Unsurprisingly, “hottest planet” searches peaked at 3:08. If you’re wondering, the correct answer to the question was Venus.