This paper presents preliminary results of our study on the topics raising interest for popularization. We compared the queries issued from various online services, namely ELI5 and Yahoo!answers forums, ScienceX and The Guardian science journalism articles' titles, queries sent to the French platform of scientific articles ISTEX, and an online survey we carried out. We obtained some valuable insights. Queries belong mainly to one of the following categories: (1) "how to. .. ?" and (2) "what is the best. .. ?". Thus, people outside a specific scientific field are mainly interested in how to solve their problems. These insights are especially valuable for content selection in the context of text simplification. For nonexpert, the most important information is the application of an object (which problem can be solved? how to use this information/object?) in their everyday activity.