What our Google searches reveal about us
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The Pat Kenny Show. With Timber Living Log Cabins. Saturday and Sunday from 10am. On Newstalk. Conversation that counts. Are you one of those people who look forward to the annual release of the top 10 things we searched Google for? Well, my next guest would be delighted that you did. Simon Rogers is Google's data editor and his new book, What We Ask Google, offers an insight as to how good or bad humanity could be faring based on what we search for. And he joins me now. Simon, good morning and welcome. Good morning. Thanks for having me.
What insights does Simon Rogers provide about Google searches?
Tell us about what exactly you do as data editor. Where are you digging and for what?
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.
Now, the question of what it tells you, I mean, can you tell about the general health, be it mental or physical health of the planet, for instance, or if not the planet, individual parts of it?
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, in that chapter about grief, you list the top searches about grief. What are the stages of grief? What is bereavement leave? What to say to somebody who's grieving? What is bargaining and grief? And so on and so forth. There are 10 listed here. The question is, do we have any idea as to how good the responses from the Internet search are? How satisfied people were with the answers they got?
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. It's a book about us as humans and what we can glean from the stuff that we want to know. And grief is one of those topics where it's not something you know about until you go through it. So essentially, you can see that people are wanting to kind of really get to grips with what's happening to them.
There's something very reassuring, I suppose, that we're all like everybody else. I mean, looking at the chapter you entitled, Why Do Toddlers Bite? The top questions, like, for example, should kids is the general category. Should kids have phones, have homework, go to school, wear uniforms, play sports, play video games, have phones in school, play football, have break time, drink milk, do chores? And these are...
questions that many parents have asked themselves and now they ask google oh absolutely and you can see we're all struggling with knowing what the right thing to do is and i think like i would say that if you're the kind of person like me where you feel like everybody else has got it sorted and and you're the only person that doesn't i can i'm here to tell you that everybody feels like that you can really see that coming through in the data
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