Six months after his mother Janet Rogers died, Simon Rogers, 58, found himself in a field in northern California, unable to sleep, feeling an overwhelming, disorienting sense of grief.
He then did what many would do. “I opened Google and started asking questions I was too embarrassed to ask out loud. “Why is grief so lonely? “How long does it last? “What should I say to a grieving friend? That’s where his book began.
He then went into the Google Trends dataset, and saw that thousands of people were asking the exact same questions at 3 am.
“When something like that hits you, you feel like you’re the only person in the world going through it,” says the British data journalist, currently data editor at Google. It moved him to peek behind the search bar and see so many reaching out for help, he says.
What We Ask Google: A Surprisingly Hopeful Picture of Humankind was released in May. It is a data-driven look at what the world’s search history tells us about ourselves. Excerpts from an interview: * You’ve shown how the data rather unexpectedly threw up a focus on other people. Is there a single question that represents that, for you? That encapsulates it for me. In a crisis, we look for information, and we look for how to help the living things we love. Checking the weather is the single most consistent daily search on Earth. I even used it as a benchmark to measure the cultural weight of everything else. When I tell people what I do for a living, they often ask if my job is depressing. What surprised me was how wrong that assumption was. Social media is a stage where we perform, curate our best lives, and posture for an audience. Search is the opposite. When you look at what people ask, you discover that… humanity’s baseline setting is a desire to learn, connect, and help each other out. * Has the data changed your perception of society at large, then? The chapter that affected me most deeply was Grief and Loss. Writing about losing my mum while wading through two decades of bereavement data was tough, but it showed me how search creates this accidental, invisible support group. It completely changed how I view digital connectivity. On a lighter note, the Food and Everyday Skills theme was a revelation. There are a few key queries that act as a barometer for modern life. Coupled with huge surges in searches for local run clubs, tennis lessons and mahjong classes, this to me reflects a culture suffering from severe screen fatigue, using search to escape back into real-world, physical human connection. The current decade seems defined by post-pandemic emotional recovery. There are so many wonderfully weird, eccentric things hiding in the numbers. Paris is celebrated as the world’s culinary capital, but the top food searched in Paris on Google is pizza! Search is a reflection of the way we interact with the world, and Google Trends data is just an expression of that.
If I had to pick one, it would be from August 2017, when Hurricane Harvey was barrelling towards Texas. For instance, in September 2021 (the month of its launch), global searches for Squid Game actually spiked higher than queries about rain. The daily search clock, meanwhile, represents the 24-hour rhythm of human life.
People were stockpiling supplies and battening down the hatches, and some Texans paused to search for something so quietly human: “How to calm a dog in a storm”. That, and the UK’s annual summer spike for “How to help a bee”, which might be the most English search query ever recorded! * What were the most common queries about? Every night, around 2 am, around the world, queries for “baby” and “sleep” spike; around 4 am, there is a spike in questions about urgent care; late at night, queries turn existential, with searches about loneliness and how to calm down. * How surprised were you, by this rather gentle picture of humankind? Realising that millions of grown adults regularly search “How to boil an egg” and “How to fold pants” shows what data visualiser Xaquín González Veira calls the “sweet, innocent ignorance” of our daily lives. * Are there queries that you think best encapsulate our times? “How to touch grass” and “How to digital detox” have shot up by 110% over 20 years. Searches for “anxiety”, “grief”, “panic attacks” and “eco-anxiety” are at extreme highs. * What data points made you laugh? And one of the top animals searched globally under “Can I keep… as a pet?” is “panda”… For the record, the answer is no. * What do you make of the way search, particularly AI-led search, has allowed us to outsource a certain amount of thought and deliberation?
