With schools partially shuttered, the roads half-empty and a red alert for air pollution in full effect, what’s a Beijinger to do?

One answer appears to be to shop online.

Searches for face masks and air purifiers on e-commerce giant Alibaba's Taobao shopping site soared by 141.5% and 50.9% respectively over the past 30 days, according to data published online by Taobao.

Taobao saw 606,031 searches for face masks from Nov. 30 to Dec. 6, when a huge blanket of hazardous smog covered much of north China for days. The weekly figure represents a 41.1% increase compared with a month earlier and a 13.2% increase on year. Searches will grow slightly over the coming week, Alibaba predicted.

Electronic air purifiers are also a big item online, with searches on Taobao peaking at more than 50,000 around the Nov. 11 “Singles’ Day” shopping holiday. Searches declined in late November and then soared again at the onset of last week’s north China “airpocalypse.”

The top two cities searching for masks and purifiers over the past 30 days were Beijing and Shenyang, the capital of northeast China’s Liaoning province.

According to the state-run China Daily newspaper, online searches for condoms in some smog-stricken Chinese cities have exceeded those in bluer-skied parts of the country over the past week. Is this because people turn to other pastimes as they avoid going out? Not exactly, according to the China Daily, which theorized: “People have greater concerns of good child bearing and try to prevent getting pregnant on smoggy days,” the paper reported, citing Taobao for the numbers.

Can you spot Tiananmen Square? An image from Haoqiao.cn's game "Everybody Search for Beijing." Illustration: Haoqiao.cn

Taobao data reviewed by China Real Time didn’t show an overall rise in searches for condoms in the past month.

A China-based sales manager for 3M contacted by China Real Time declined to reveal figures for the company’s recent mask sales, which he said was a trade secret.

Bouts of choking smog have become such a commonplace occurrence in Chinese cities including Beijing that some in the travel industry have joined the effort to capitalize on the haze.

Among them is international hotel-booking website Haoqiao.cn, which last year designed a mobile Web game titled “Everybody Search for Beijing.” The game presents a matrix of smog-obscured photos – first four, then nine, and increasing to 80 – and challenges players to find the snapshot of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square hidden among an array of images of Shanghai’s Oriental Pearl TV Tower.

By late Wednesday, as Beijing’s air quality index lingered at 280 – in the range of what the government calls “heavily polluted” – the game was again making the rounds. And to smog-weary residents, the three options it gives players at the end of each round may not sound that farfetched after all: Try again, receive a “smog subsidy” (a discount on the firm’s website) and “escape from the smog” (which points users toward hotels they can book at overseas destinations with fresh air).

--Felicia Sonmez and Marco Huang. Follow Felicia on Twitter @feliciasonmez.