The Night His Search History Was Spread Across the Table, He Realized the Problem Wasn't Where to Buy Japanese Tengsu

When A-Hong turned his laptop around, the screen showed a long list of almost identical search strings. He had only meant to help an elder in the family find a men's health product he'd heard someone mention, but two or three hours later, he had a pile of open tabs and was more confused than before. He asked me, "Don't you think it's strange? The same few words bring up such different things."

I told him not to rush into clicking, and to read through his search history from the beginning. At first his searches were vague, just the product name; later they got longer, with words like "Taiwan," "in stock," and "proxy buying" added. That was where the problem started—he thought he was narrowing things down, but he was actually mixing pages of different natures together. Some were articles, some were storefronts, some were old forum posts. Lined up side by side, of course everyone seemed to say something different.

His first guess was that if a page looked nice and had clear photos, it was probably more reliable. We actually opened a few, and that guess was quickly overturned. One page was beautifully laid out, but had no company name or contact information anywhere—just an order button. Another looked plain, yet clearly listed import information, ingredient labeling, and customer service channels. Appearance and source, clearly, are two different things.

A-Hong's second guess was more common: he felt that if many people discussed it and many people left comments, that meant there was no problem. I reminded him that lots of comments don't equal lots of verification, especially when every comment has the same tone and says only the same thing—that's actually a signal to stop and think. He flipped through a few pages and laughed at himself: "Right, how come every post reads like it was written by the same person?"

At that point, he suddenly leaned back in his chair and said what he really wanted to know wasn't the product itself, but where to find information without being led around. He read out the string he'd been typing—where to buy Japanese Tengsu—and asked me whether the question itself was wrong. I said the question wasn't wrong; it was just too easily intercepted by all kinds of storefronts. A better way to ask is to break it into: "What type of product is this?" "Who imports or distributes it?" "What does the packaging say?" "Who can I ask if I have questions?"

So we took a sheet of paper and sorted the pages we found into three columns. The first column was source: was there a named company, address, customer service phone number, or just a messaging app account? The second was labeling: were ingredients, place of origin, expiration date, and warnings complete, or just a few promotional phrases? The third was claims: was the content stating facts, or promising a certain result? Halfway through filling it in, A-Hong realized many pages didn't even pass the first column—yet he had treated them as reference material.

He also mentioned that during the process, a customer service rep had added him as a friend, very enthusiastically, and kept pushing him to order that day. He didn't do it; instead, he screenshotted the conversation and went back to compare it with the labeling on the packaging. It seemed like a small action, but it calmed him down a lot. Later he decided that anything he couldn't understand on a label, he would set aside first, and not believe it just because the other person sounded certain. If he really had doubts, he would take the list of medicines and supplements he was using and ask a pharmacist or doctor, rather than looking for answers in the comments.

At the end of that night, A-Hong deleted his search history and started over with a few more specific questions, and closed several pages with unclear sources. He said that after all that trouble, the biggest gain wasn't finding which storefront, but finally being able to tell the difference between "someone is selling it" and "someone can explain it clearly." As for the elder, he planned to go with them to a pharmacy first and get the questions answered clearly before saying anything else.