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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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.
Chapter 2: 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?
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Chapter 3: How does Google Trends data reflect humanity's mental health?
So, for example, you're a pet owner. And I'm looking at can dogs. Can dogs eat cheese, mango, grapes, cherries, peaches, asparagus, pickles, corn, mushrooms? All very interesting questions because they, for different breeds, they may have slightly different answers. What about the other one? Can dogs eat their own poo? Which they do. Can dogs eat their own vomit? Which they do.
You are a dog owner.
Yeah.
Well yeah I have a dog who features heavily in that chapter actually and he was what they call a foster fail which is where we were fostering him for a couple of days and that was seven years ago so we obviously didn't succeed as foster parents but we are pet parents now and you have to learn all of this stuff and obviously you're responsible for this creature and their life so you want to make sure you don't make any terrible food related mistakes.
Now, it's very interesting. We've been talking about children and so on. And there are questions that crop up in a timely way. For example, at two o'clock in the morning, the question most frequently asked is, how do I get my baby to sleep?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a global phenomenon. It's not just it can be all around the world. Anytime, anywhere you are about two in the morning, the words baby and sleep will spike in search. And there is a rhythm to the way we search. We see similar things being searched at the same times of day or even the same times of the year.
Like people learn how to play piano in December, for instance, just before the Christmas holidays. And we see this with tons of things around the ways we live our lives.
You open your book with a mention of a hurricane, Harvey, which was barreling towards Texas and Louisiana. And it's interesting that a lot of people in that moment of perhaps peril and certainly fear turn to Google for help.
Yes, absolutely. And you'd expect that. There's some stuff you'd expect. Obviously, you know, your property and your lives are at risk. But one search we saw was the spike in searches for how to calm a dog in a storm. And I love that search so much because it's incredibly human.
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