Simon Rogers

speaker

267 appearances 3 recordings 3 series first heard May 2026 last heard 7 Jun

Simon Rogers’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.

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The Pat Kenny Show · What our Google searches reveal about us · 7 Jun 2026 podcast

So I'm based in San Francisco in the States, and I basically work with Google Trends data, which is probably the world's biggest publicly accessible data set.

It's a kind of sample of all of the millions of searches, and they're all anonymized and aggregated and so on and categorized.

And basically, we work every time that the data that we produce goes public.

That's the stuff that my team does.

So we work on a project called Year in Search.

So you can see what people search every year.

And we work really on helping people use and access this incredible data set.

Well, I'll tell you that when I started writing the book, I didn't necessarily go into it thinking it would be a particularly optimistic book.

I just thought it'd be interesting to look at how people search day to day for their everyday lives.

And actually, what I've discovered is it's a little more varied picture than that.

So when I started writing it, my mum had just died a few months earlier.

So I thought I'll start writing the grief chapter first.

And what I found was obviously, you know, when it happens to you, you feel like you're alone.

You're the only person this has ever happened to.

And in fact, what I saw was other people were searching for the same things I was searching for.

And also, a lot of people are searching for how to help people in my situation, the right thing to say and so on.

And that was incredibly reassuring to me that, you know, we go through these moments in life where we feel like we are the only person in that situation and actually we're not.

So you can really see in that and you can also see that people really want to help and searches for help are actually higher now than they've ever been in all Google Trends history.

Well, that is the question that I guess I don't answer because I'm really interested in what people ask.

So deliberately, I'm not talking about the content of the internet or it's not even really a book about technology.

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