As 2018 draws to a close, Google is looking back on all the biggest questions Americans had throughout the year.

As part of its annual "Year in Search" series, the company released its list of the year's most trending search topics beginning with the words "How to," reminding us of all the things we needed help with in 2018.

Topics that made the cut were the ones that saw a spike in search traffic compared to the year before, Google said.

Questions about November's midterm elections took the top two spots on the list, reflecting the surge in voter turnout that changed the national balance of power. Other trending questions included ones about massive lottery jackpots and another about buying cryptocurrency.

Read on for the full list of the year's most trending "how-to" topics:

10. 'How to get boogie down emote'

Epic Games

If you don't know what any of the above words mean, don't be alarmed. It comes from "Fortnite: Battle Royale," the wildly popular free video game that in just over a year has generated more than $1 billion in revenue. In "Fortnite," players can unlock "emotes," or special victory dances for their characters — you've probably seen kids "flossing" at some point. The coveted "boogie down" emote was especially popular, it seems.

Read more: Fortnite — a free video game — is a billion-dollar money machine

9. 'How to screen record'

Apple doesn't include instructions on how to capture screen recordings on its products, so Internet users turned to Google for the answers. Here's our guide on how to screen record.

Read more: How to screenshot and screen record on an iPhone, iPad, and Mac

8. 'How to buy Bitcoin'

Reuters/Dado Ruvic

In January, the question on millions of Americans' minds was how to buy Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that skyrocketed to $19,843 apiece in December 2017. Unfortunately for Bitcoin investors, the momentum didn't hold, and the currency plummeted steadily throughout 2018. A year after it peaked, Bitcoin is worth a little over $3,000, and some experts fear it will never peak again.

Read more: Bitcoin unlikely to ever hit another record high, Barclays says

7. 'How to play Powerball'

In late October, four days after someone won the $1.57 billion Mega Millions jackpot, two lucky Americans won a Powerball jackpot worth $750 million. The massive prize was the fourth-largest in US history.

Read more: 2 winning tickets were sold for the $750 million Powerball jackpot. Here are the winning numbers

6. 'How to get the old Snapchat back'

Reuters

In February, Snapchat released a controversial redesign that separated users' celebrity Snapchat stories from their friends' stories. The update triggered backlash from plenty of users, including celebrities like Kylie Jenner and Chrissy Teigen. Snapchat eventually tweaked its design in May to satisfy users' biggest complaints.

Read more: Snapchat is changing its controversial redesign

5. 'How to turn off automatic updates'

Not many people like those pop-up notifications telling you it's time to update new software on your computer or phone. So it's no surprise people would flock to Google seeking how to turn those annoying updates off.

Read more: How to stop Apple from automatically downloading new software for your Mac

4. 'How to buy Ripple'

When cryptocurrency mania hit its peak at the beginning of 2018, XRP, or Ripple, was one of the biggest beneficiaries. The digital coin was worth more than $120 billion at its January apex, with only Bitcoin proving more popular. Although the diehards are still holding on, the cryptocurrency is worth just 10% of its peak value today.

Read more: Everything you need to know about Ripple and the company that created it

3. 'How to play Mega Millions'

(Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

With more than $1.5 billion at stake, it's no surprise Americans were Googling how to play the Mega Millions lottery. In October, the Mega Millions jackpot reached a near-record $1.54 billion, with one lucky player from South Carolina claiming the entire prize.

Read more: A single ticket holder in South Carolina won the $1.537 billion Mega Millions jackpot, close to the all-time record

2. 'How to register to vote'

The 2018 midterm elections prompted millions of people to search for instructions on how to register to vote. More than 800,000 people registered to vote on September's National Voter Registration Day alone, setting the stage for a heavily contested election season.

Read more: 'Thank God for Taylor Swift': Voter registration in Tennessee booms after pop star's Democratic endorsements

1. 'How to vote'

Voting booths are set up in Waterloo, Iowa.Scott Olson/Getty Images

The most trending "how-to" search of the year was "how to vote," according to Google. That comes as no surprise, as the 2018 US midterm elections dominated political headlines for much of the year. The elections saw the highest level of voter turnout in more than 100 years.

Read more: See the full House and Senate results of the 2018 midterm elections

In June, rapper XXXTentacion was shot dead in his car after leaving a motorcycle dealer in South Florida.

At the time of his death, XXXTentacion — whose real name is Jahseh Onfroy — was awaiting trial for a 2016 domestic abuse case. He faced charges of aggravated battery of his pregnant girlfriend, domestic battery by strangulation, false imprisonment, and witness tampering.

Onfroy rose to fame off of his 2016 single "Look at Me!" His debut studio album, "17," reached No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album chart and was certified gold in 2017. Onfroy's second studio album, "?," debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart in March.

By August, four suspects accused of killing Onfroy had been taken into custody.

On Tuesday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai was interrogated by the House Judiciary Committee over a number of topics including the company's data collection and potential bias in the search results it serves up to users.

Republican House members — including Rep. Lamar Smith (TX) — didn't hold back on the topic of conservative bias.

"It will require a herculean effort by the chief executive and senior management to change the political bias now programmed into the company's culture," Smith said, citing "irrefutable" studies on the subject. "Google could well elect the next president with dire implications to our democracy."

Pichai responded: "With respect… we don't agree with the methodology [of the studies]."

Read more:Congress grills Google CEO Sundar Pichai for the first time

One person watching closely was Gabriel Weinberg, co-founder and CEO DuckDuckGo — a privacy-focused search engine company that competes with Google Search and last week, revealed a study of its own (not referenced by Rep. Smith).

The study, among other things, found that participants saw vast differences in search results when searching for the same keywords (like "gun control" or "immigration") from different locations across the country. The study controlled for other potential factors of personalization by having its participants log out of their Google accounts and search from an incognito state.

"What [our study] does reveal, or at least suggests, is that Google's collection and use of personal data, including location, which is then used to filter specific search results, is having an effect akin to the effects of a political bias," Weinberg told Business Insider on Tuesday. "That is an important nuance often missed in these discussions.
"

Essentially, Weinberg is saying that even if Google does not create its products with the intent of having a political bias, the fact that location information is used to filter results creates its own form of bias.

"If you live in this ZIP code, we're going to show you the NRA. But if you live in this other ZIP code, we're not going to show you the NRA," Weinberg says could explain the results his team discovered. "If that's what [Google's] doing, then you're putting a whole ZIP code (or whatever the location boundaries) in a filter bubble."

Screenshot

Filter bubbles occur when users get trapped in a cycle being served content that interests them most. The personalization may sound appealing, but the implications of not seeing content that contradicts one's beliefs can have major consequences.

"That's the problem with these algorithms," Weinberg said. "You make these things, you don't even realize what's going on, and then all of a sudden you're potentially influencing tens of millions of people."

A Google spokesperson denied the results of DuckDuckGo's study, saying: "This study's methodology and conclusions are flawed since they are based on the assumption that any difference in search results are based on personalization. That is simply not true. In fact, there are a number of factors that can lead to slight differences, including time and location, which this study doesn't appear to have controlled for effectively."

Weinberg said he anticipated Google's rebuttal and that is why he and his team controlled for both time and location in their research. Also, he argues the findings were far from trivial.

"On the surface level, [Google] said there were slight differences, and that is just totally different from what we saw," he explained. "We saw vast differences."

Weiberg told us that even if Google refutes DuckDuckGo's findings, he hopes it will at least inspires others — especially academics — to dig into the issue further.

"To date, no one has been really doing these studies to hold [Google] accountable," he said. "I don't think they want to acknowledge that it can have the manipulative effect that it can."

Most CEOs tend to choose their words carefully, fearing the consequences of saying anything that could be deemed controversial. For better and for worse, Elon Musk is not nearly as cautious.

The CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company sometimes appears to prefer speaking his mind and dealing with the consequences later, like when he mocks his critics or opens up about his personal life. Musk's candor has endeared him to the fans and customers who find him more relatable than other famous executives, while also frustrating some analysts and investors who argue that he is temperamental and reckless.

Read more: Elon Musk says Tesla vehicles will soon be able to drive without any human input

The intense devotion and criticism Musk has provoked with both public and private statements have contributed to his status as one of the most scrutinized figures in American culture. This year, Musk's remarks have more often tended to get himself in trouble, hurting Tesla's stock price, spurring investigations from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Department of Justice, and attracting lawsuits from investors. How Musk handles himself in the future will determine, in part, how effective of a leader he is as his companies move from upstarts to established players in highly competitive industries.

Below are 36 quotes that illustrate why Musk attracts so much attention.

If you ask John Blackledge, a financial analyst at Cowen Equity Research, you can't find a better bet for next year than Amazon.

The company has numerous opportunities ahead of it that could boost its revenue and swell its profits, including not just widely watched areas like its cloud-computing business, but also more obscure ones, such as its business-to-business marketplace, Blackledge said Tuesday in a new research report. What's more, its stock is significantly undervalued, he said; Blackledge's price target of $2,250 a share is 37% higher than Amazon's current price.

"Amazon has multiple levers to drive further upside," Blackledge said in his report, in which he reiterated his "outperform" rating on the company's shares. He continued: "Amazon is our best idea for 2019."

Read this:Amazon has quietly taken a big and fast-growing stake in a $7 trillion market

Blackledge is bullish on Amazon's prospects pretty much across the board. The company's overall revenue should grow at compounded annual growth rate of about 17% over the next five years, he said. He expects its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization— a widely watched measure among analysts that serves as a proxy for how much cash companies generate — to grow even faster, jumping 34% next year, 31% in 2020, and 25% on average over the next five years.

Amazon's advertising and cloud businesses are booming

Much of that growth will come from Amazon's nascent advertising business, he said. The company has collected a wealth of data on its consumers via its e-commerce site over the last 20-plus years. Other companies are eager to take advantage of that data to target Amazon's customers with ads, Blackledge said.

Amazon's ad business is on track to generate about $9 billion in revenue this year, he said. But because of that demand, it will be pulling in about $43 billion in sales by 2023, he said.

Even better for the company and its investors, it doesn't cost the company all that much to run ads, so as that business grows, so too will its cash flow and profits, he said.

The company will also benefit from Amazon Web Services, its cloud arm, Blackledge said. The growing number of companies moving their computing processes from their own data servers to cloud services such as AWS should continue to boost its sales, he said. AWS's revenue should grow by 31% on average over the next five years, he said. And because cloud services are generally less costly to operate than running an online store, Amazon's profits should boom as AWS becomes bigger, he said.

"AWS should enjoy years of secular tailwinds ... as further workloads migrate to the cloud," he said.

Don't underestimate the power of e-commerce

Many analysts have based their optimism about Amazon on AWS and its advertising business. But Blackledge has high hopes for its core e-commerce business too, even though the growth of that business has slowed of late.

On the consumer side, the company is poised to take market share away from incumbents in the apparel, grocery, and consumables sectors, he said. Amazon should also benefit as more consumers sign up for its Prime membership service, which offers free shipping and other perks. The number of US households with Prime is now 60 million, up 9% from a year ago. By contrast, the US has some 126 million total households.

About two-thirds of the US consumers who bought goods from Amazon in September were Prime members, and about 80% of Prime members buy goods from the site every month, according to Blackledge. What's more, they buy more frequently than non-members and purchase goods across more categories, he said.

"The impact of Prime and path for further penetration are perhaps under-appreciated," he said.

Amazon Business is becoming a big business

But the company has big e-commerce opportunities outside the US also, Blackledge said. Over the last five years, it opened up or made widely available its online store in India, Mexico, and Australia. The combined retail market in those countries is $1.8 trillion, giving the company plenty of room to generate new sales by taking share from traditional players.

Meanwhile, Amazon's business-to-business marketplace — where companies and organizations buy parts and other supplies from corporate vendors — is already growing rapidly. Amazon Business is on pace to have some $10 billion of goods sold through it this year, up from just $1 billion two years ago. And Amazon is quickly expanding the service; it's now available in seven countries, including Germany, France, the UK, and the US.

Amazon "is one of the few global companies capable of adding $100+ [billion] in addressable opportunity consistently by entering and scaling in massive domestic and/or [international] markets," Blackledge said.

NASA's InSight lander has taken its first selfie on Mars.

The selfie, released on Tuesday and shown above, is made up of 11 images that were stitched together. The resulting photo shows InSight's solar panels and deck, along with the scientific instruments on top of the deck and the lander's weather sensor.

InSight landed on Mars on November 26 after a nearly seven-month journey from Earth. Since then, scientists have gotten their first look at InSight's "workspace": a 14-by-7-foot area in front of the lander. The image scientists have of that workspace is also a mosaic, created out of 52 separate images.

The $830 million InSight mission to Mars is the first since the nuclear-powered Curiosity rover reached the red planet more than six years ago. But InSight is not made to roam around. Instead, NASA scientists are hoping to use the lander's tools to study Mars' internal structure and the history of the planet's formation.

InSight is equipped with a seismometer that will listen for seismic movements on the red planet, which are known as Mars quakes. And a heat probe will dig down 16 feet to measure Mars' temperature and help scientists better understand the planet's geology.

Over the next few weeks, scientists and engineers at NASA will determine where those instruments should go within the lander's workspace. Then, the lander's robotic arm will grab the heat probe and seismometer and carefully place them on the Martian surface.

Another view from NASA's InSight lander on the surface of Mars.NASA/JPL-Caltech

InSight was launched to Mars along with two briefcase-sized satellites collectively called Mars Cube One, which helped record and relay crucial landing data to NASA mission control.

NASA chose to land InSight in a region of Mars called Elysium Planitia because the area is relatively free of boulders and craters.

"The near-absence of rocks, hills and holes means it'll be extremely safe for our instruments," Bruce Banerdt, InSight's principal investigator, said in a press release. "This might seem like a pretty plain piece of ground if it weren't on Mars, but we're glad to see that."

Elysium Planitia is located just north of the Martian equator, where the sun's rays remain strong throughout the year. That solar power is expected to allow InSight to operate on Mars for two Earth years using its solar panels.

Back to the Future fans will swoon over this "DeLorean" hovercraft.

It's a custom-designed sculpture of a DeLorean.

Have you ever seen a DeLorean do THIS before?

Matt Riese: "Hi I'm Matt Riese. This is my crazy creation. A hand-made, amphibious, hovering time-traveling Delorean. Come on, I'll show you how it works"

It's made out of styrofoam and wrapped in fiberglass.

It consists of some real DeLorean parts.

It can cruise on the water, reaching speeds up to 81 mph.

Matt Riese: "You can see this is the lift engine. This is how it works. You turn on this motor and the big fan in there will push a bunch of air down. Some of that air gets diverted into this vinyl skirt here. Which forms basically an inner tube around the perimeter of the whole and that traps the pocket of high-pressure air underneath the rest of the whole and that lifts the whole about six to eight inches off the ground, water, snow, dirt, sand... Whatever you are over"

The hovercraft runs on a 23-horsepower thrust engine pushed by a 36-inch fan.

Rudders help the driver steer.

The steering wheel can be moved to different positions.

Matt Riese: Check out this switch panel here. We got headlights. We got navigation lamps for the Coast Guard. We got cockpit lights. Flux capacitor, that's the colored lights around the perimeter. And then anti-gravity, which is the pulse engines embedded in the tires which you can see flashing.

There are some real DeLorean parts. The side marker lights. These grill pieces. The logo here and the grill emblem. And the doors are created with molds of the real Delorean doors. You can see the armrests. I got the leather texture and everything. That's fiberglass but that's from a real DeLorean."

The hovercraft took a total of four-and-a-half years to build.

Matt Riese: So piloting this basically feels like driving a car that's constantly sliding around on ice. You got your foot pedal and you got your steering wheel and it feels like you're in a car, but you're just sliding around every which way with no friction.

Female founders have brought in just 2.2% of US VC this year (yes, again)

A look inside one of The Riveter’s Seattle co-working spaces

Jane VC, a new fund for female entrepreneurs, wants founders to cold email them

A startup plans to pay you for opening a credit card with a lower rate. Or moving your money into a higher-yielding savings account. Or using a coupon at your favorite retailer.

The service is the brainchild of Status Money, a relatively new player in an industry led by larger firms like Mint or CreditKarma that recommend credit card offers, high-yield savings accounts or online personal loans within free personal finance software. In return for sharing their data, consumers get access to offers. The tech companies receive what is effectively a referral fee.

Status' rewards program, months in the making, aims to share some of that fee with users and also persuade them to improve their financial health in other ways that don't necessarily mean revenue for the startup, according to Majd Maksad, one of its founders.

"This is the first program in this space that gives people cash rewards," Maksad said. "These aren't points or some weird currency, this is real money."

Status and other firms are positioning themselves at the nexus of two prevailing global trends: the growing use of technology that's spitting out vast troves of data to mine for valuable insights and the drive to use behavioral economics findings to create policies to help persuade humans to be more healthy. Those suggestions may include nudging them to walk more, signing up for a retirement program at work or, as of Tuesday, paying them to move money into a higher-yielding savings account.

The aim isn't entirely altruistic. Status' rewards are likely to distinguish it from competitors and encourage people to engage more fully with the sales leads on its site. If successful, that would mean more user growth and higher revenue.

Read more: 'If you get to 700, 750, we'll cut your mortgage costs a little bit': JPMorgan is working on ways to reward you for improving your credit score, and it may be the future of consumer finance

The product works like this: an individual receives $5 for opening an account (a badge on the homepage touts the cash value) and another $2 for linking various bank and credit bureau accounts. Users can then earn additional rewards by signing up for other financial products that Status recommends, or engaging in other activity on the site. Like a game, badges identify opportunities and encourage engagement.

That could mean signing up for things like a high yield savings account or refinancing a loan, and even managing a budget. It could mean using a coupon at your favorite retailer, delivering rewards on top of the savings. And the firm is even in talks with a daily deals site to offer additional rewards to nudge consumers into using that coupon for a restaurant or sightseeing cruise that they bought months ago.

Once $10 or more has been collected, Status allows user to withdraw the funds and drop them into a linked bank account. Some products may deliver $20 or more in rewards; there's no cap on the amount of rewards that can be earned and they don't expire.

The idea is to turn a traditional technology model on its head. Rather than simply monetizing the data it collects through bank accounts and credit files and offering a free service in exchange Status aims to return some of that value to consumers. And adds transparency around how it's being used. The firm doesn't sell data or share it with third parties.

"If I'm the consumer giving you data and information, why don't I get a share of that?" Maksad said in an interview. "What we're trying to do is create a more of a shared business model."

Read more:People aren't paying their credit cards and more accounts are being shut down, and it could be a sign that 'economic clouds are darkening'

Maksad, the former head of decision management for Citigroup's digital payments group, founded Status with Korash Hernandez, a colleague from Citi who had left to become one of the first employees at Goldman Sachs's online lender, Marcus. They joined up in May 2016, raising $4 million in a seed round from AltPoint Ventures. The website was unveiled in September 2017 and there's now a mobile app for the more than 200,000 users.

From the beginning, the two data scientists aimed to separate themselves from the larger competitors by using machine learning to make smarter recommendations — delivering better leads to its partners — and to return real value to consumers.

The initial product was a dashboard comparing an individual's financial situation to peers based on factors such as address, age, or credit score. It delivers information about how they stack up to peers and, hopefully, persuades them to take action to save more or spend less, Maksad said.

"The equation between consumers and their tech companies is going to have to change," Maksad said. "There is no doubt in our minds that open data and financial transparency is coming. We want to be one of the ones to lead that change."

JPMorgan — the largest bank in the country - is also considering ways it can reward people for improving their financial health, CEO Jamie Dimon said in a July interview with Business Insider. The firm would provide incentives, like reducing loan costs, for lifting a credit score to a certain threshold, Dimon said. The bank is thinking about beta testing several tools around that idea, though it's unclear whether those would be tied to improving credit scores, financial education, or other things.

Adrian Aoun, the founder and CEO of healthcare startup Forward, spoke about the importance of preventative care at the annual IGNITION conference, hosted by Business Insider, in New York on Dec. 3.

Aoun, a former Google executive, started Forward just two years ago, and has since opened futuristic-looking doctors offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City. Memberships work like that of a gym: you pay a monthly fee, starting at $150, and doctors work alongside patients to monitor health risks with advanced AI technology.

If you'd like to watch his presentation, it starts at 2:23:14 here.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

Amazon: retailer, cloud-computing powerhouse, and voice-computing pioneer. And now, toymaker.

Amazon released on its website four new products related to toys:

The new products were first spotted by TJI Research, which keeps tabs on new products Amazon that puts on its website. Since TJI spotted the new products on Monday, Amazon took all four of them off the site as of Tuesday evening, and they now return error pages. They were released under Amazon's AmazonBasics line, according to TJI.

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the record about why the listings were taken down.

It marks the first time Amazon has released anything that resembles a toy for children under a private label. The items collectively are probably not what an average consumer thinks of when they hear the term "toy." It's mostly large, plush blocks, like ones you might find in a daycare or preschool.

That would make sense if the new items were similar to AmazonBasics' other items that are intended more for businesses than for personal use. Other AmazonBasics items include office chairs, standing desks, and bedding.

Still, the number of categories and items Amazon is developing and selling has exploded in recent months. Most recently, Amazon decided to make its own mattresses under both the AmazonBasics brand as well as its furniture brand, Rivet.

Read more: Amazon is now selling its own mattresses, and it shows why the industry is worried about the e-commerce giant's growth

Amazon's private brands have come under fire lately, as some critics have pointed to the problems inherent with the company's overall strategy to be both a retailer of goods and a marketplace platform for other sellers.

Critics including the European Union's competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, and US Sen. Elizabeth Warren have said that Amazon limits competition, as it can use its sales data to help launch its own brands and products like the new mattress. The EU has opened a preliminary investigation into whether Amazon has violated antitrust rules by using third-party data to launch its own products, and German officials have launched their own investigation.

Emotional support peacocks. Emotional support snakes. Emotional support hamsters.

People have brought all sorts of "support animals" into public places recently, arguing the creatures should be allowed to fly on planes or come into offices because they serve a mental-health purpose.

But the trend has led to a spike in in-flight problems for airlines. Animals have peed, defecated, bit, and in one case mauled people on Delta planes. So the company announced Monday that emotional support pets will no longer be allowed on any Delta flights longer than eight hours.

When it comes to the science behind the concept of a support pet, "the research is quite inconsistent on whether the animals really do anything at all," Forensic psychologist Jeffrey Younggren from the University of Missouri told Business Insider.

By law, a peacock cannot be a service animal. Thomson Reuters

Younggren has spent years studying the trend of patients asking their therapists to sign letters certifying that they need an emotional support animal.

Overall, he said, scientists don't know if such pets do anything "other than make somebody happy."

But despite that lack of evidence, many therapists sign "ESP" letters for their patients, sometimes without even seeing the animals in action.

"How can you say the animal does something if you've never seen them with a patient?" Younggren said.

New rules for Delta flights

As such signed letters get more common, some pet owners are using the designation as a way to let their pets fly on planes with them for free.

As the holiday travel season approaches, Delta is cracking down, instituting some of the strictest support-animal rules of any US carrier to date. Support pets will no longer be allowed on eight-plus-hour flights if the ticket is purchased on or after December 18. The airline is also instituting a ban on "ESP"'s under four months of age. No exceptions will be granted after February 1, 2019.

Delta said there has been an 84% increase in incidents involving unruly animals since 2016.

Earlier this year, the airline started requiring anyone flying with an emotional-support pet to sign a waiver stating that the animal can behave on a flight. The airline has also initiated other restrictions, including requiring proof of vaccination for the animals and only accepting certification letters from a doctor or mental health professional. (In the past, travelers could easy pay for such a letter online.)

United has also made its policies more strict, as ABC News previously reported.

What is an emotional support animal?

There's not much regulation about what constitutes an emotional support pet. People can buy their way into a designation pretty easily online for around $70.

Researchers in California looked at more than a decade of records of registered "assistance" dogs and found that from 1999-2012, there was a huge uptick in the number of smaller dogs, older dogs, and dogs used for psychiatric and medical assistance in the state. Those researchers said the study revealed a growing trend of "misunderstanding" and "misuse" of support dogs.

Support pets are not the same as service animals. According to the Americans with Disabilities Act, a service animal must be trained to perform tasks for a person with a disability, be it physical or psychiatric. Disabilities can include being blind or deaf, using a wheelchair, relying on a dog to remind you to take meds, or having a dog around in case of an anxiety attack.

Under federal law, only dogs and miniature horses weighing less than 100 pounds qualify for the "service animal" designation.

These trained animals are on the job and allowed to accompany their humans anywhere that members of the general public can go (including businesses, hospitals, and just about anywhere that's not a sterile operating room).

But the law is clear: "Service animals are working animals, not pets." The ADA even spells out that "dogs whose sole function is to provide comfort or emotional support do not qualify as service animals under the ADA."

The Fair Housing Act, however, is a bit more lenient: It says that US tenants have a right to keep "assistance animals," including emotional support pets, in their homes even if a leaser has a strict no-pets policy.

Therapy dogs are a third category of animal, and they're trained to help calm patients down during therapy sessions, usually in clinical settings.

Animals can help people feel better, but they have to be trained

People who train and certify dogs to work with patients are worried about the growing number of untrained pets flying on planes.

Budimir Jevtic/Shutterstock

Alice Smith, a client services coordinator at the PAWS dog training center in Florida, told Business Insider that untrained pets are giving real service dogs a bad name.

"There are people who just wanna be able to take their dogs with them everywhere, and they go online and buy a vest," Smith said. She added that if owners don't put in the six months to a year required to train an animal, the dog can end up barking and acting out in public.

However, Smith believes dogs can help for people dealing with anxiety and depression. As a pet owner herself, she said she has benefitted from having dogs around when she's upset.

"My dogs have just known it," she said. "They would come over to me, and get close to me, and as soon as I would pet them, I would calm down."

Smith said there are likely many other people who'd benefit from having a furry, well-behaved friend nearby. She said she even fielded calls from students in Florida who were scared about getting on the bus after the school shooting in Parkland and thought a support dog might help. Other kids call the training center because they're getting bullied and want an emotional support dog to help them get through the day safely. Dogs can also help guide their owners to exits in a panic, or just lean into a person to calm them down in a crowd.

"They can feel that dog's pressure, and know the dog's there," Smith said.

But Younggren pointed out that some people are afraid of dogs or allergic to them. For those individuals, a flight alongside an emotional support pet could be an anxiety- or illness-provoking experience.

It boils down to a simple, well-known problem, he said: "People who love dogs think everybody loves dogs."

Sundar Pichai's 3 1/2 hour testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday was noticeably lacking in enlightening answers.

The Google CEO was there as a witness to talk about transparency and accountability at the Californian technology giant, and it was a rare opportunity for serious scrutiny of Google's — and the broader tech industry's — data-collection policies and social impact.

Instead, Republican lawmakers fixated on the notion that tech companies like Google are deliberately biased against conservatives, trying to censor them from social networks and search results. They cited random anecdotes and disputed studies.

Republican Rep. Steve Chabot of Ohio complained about the negative news stories that appeared when he searched for the Republican attempts to repeal Obamacare. Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas ranted about Wikipedia undoing one of his staffer's edits, without ever actually asking a question. Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa, a congressman repeatedly accused of racism, nonsensically asked why an unflattering message about him flashed up on an iPhone being used by one of his grandchildren. Pichai carefully responded, "Congressman, iPhone is made by a different company."

(Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu quipped, "To some of my colleagues across the aisle, if you're getting bad press articles and bad search results, don't blame Google or Facebook or Twitter — consider blaming yourself.")

Fox News/YouTube On the relatively few occasions Pichai was pushed more substantially on issues, his reticence and obtuseness was telling.

Asked repeatedly about "Dragonfly," Google's efforts to build a censored search engine for China, Pichai clearly avoided answering questions, giving only the mealy-mouthed answer that Google wasn't planning to launch it "right now." When pushed, he said more than 100 employees were working on the project at one point — far less than the 300 reported by The Intercept, which initially broke the news of Dragonfly's existence.

In another exchange, asked about whether Google was tracking a congressman's cellphone, Pichai said he'd need to check the settings, which may have been technically correct but sidestepped the obvious point that Google is tracking (at least) hundreds of millions of people's devices, and not necessarily with their informed consent.

But other key subjects, from Google's involvement in military contracts to how the executive team approved huge payouts for employees accused of sexual misconduct, were never mentioned at all.

One big problem was the format itself, something that has caused issues in previous hearings featuring technology executives like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Congresspeople only have five minutes each to ask their questions, which is barely enough time to even get into specifics, especially when Pichai (or any other witness, for that matter) spends half of that time giving boiler-plate answers and filibustering.

Fewer and better-informed questioners, with more time each, could produce vastly more illuminating answers from the Committee's witnesses. If Pichai's hearing taught us anything, it's that this model for hearings is broken.

At a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai was asked some difficult questions. None was more difficult than a question asked by Iowa Rep. Steve King, however, whose question was literally impossible for Pichai to answer.

King said his 7-year-old granddaughter was playing a game on her phone before an election — most likely King's November 2018 reelection bid — and was shown a picture of the congressman that included some not-so-flattering language.

"I'm not going to say into the record what kind of language was used around that picture of her grandfather," he said.

Then, holding up his Apple device, King asked Pichai, "How does that show up on a 7-year-old's iPhone who's playing a kids game?"

The Google CEO answered the question by saying, "Congressman, iPhone is made by a different company."

The Democratic staff table erupted in laughter at Pichai's reply, according to Business Insider's Joe Perticone, who attended Tuesday's hearing.

King backtracked and said, "It might have been an Android. It's just … it was a hand-me-down of some kind."

Later in the hearing, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-California) told the Iowa congressman that if he wanted "positive search results, do positive things." King has repeatedly found himself in hot water over his insensitive racial comments.

Read more: Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu tears intro Republican colleagues during Google hearing: 'If you want positive search results do positive things'

King wasn't alone in holding up his iPhone when addressing Google's CEO on Tuesday.

Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas) showed off his Apple device when asking Pichai whether Google tracked users' phones for location data. Rep. Tom Marino (R-Pennsylvania) held his up as well when telling Pichai of the major responsibility he had because "there's a lot of people who believe anything that's put out, by anyone."

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