What We Ask Google
A Surprisingly Hopeful History of Humankind
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- Pedido anticipado
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- Se espera: 5 may 2026
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- USD 11.99
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- Pedido anticipado
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- USD 11.99
Descripción editorial
Ever wondered what goes through other people’s minds—their silly questions, their inner anxieties, hopes, and dreams?
In What We Ask Google, Simon Rogers explores insights from the world’s biggest dataset: an epic snapshot, two decades long and counting, of our collective brain. What it reveals about us might surprise you.
Every June, for instance, the world sees a spike in searches for “How to help a bee.” Reassuringly, people consistently want to know, “Where to donate blood?” after natural disasters. And despite superficial differences (such as the deeply divided world map of cat people vs. dog people), humanity has a lot more in common than we often acknowledge. After all, everywhere around the world, it’s two a.m. when parents want to know how to get their baby to sleep.
Brimming with insights that vary from the playful to the profound, What We Ask Google delves into the momentous and the mundane secrets of what we ask when we get the chance to ask anything, offering a surprisingly hopeful picture of humankind.
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Rogers (Facts Are Sacred), a data editor for Google, offers a rose-colored reflection on commonly googled questions. He thematically groups the queries, sprinkling his rundown with brisk commentary on how they reveal a world of seekers. There are cyclical patterns, like baby and sleep questions spiking around 2 a.m. and swelling cookbook searches every December, as well as larger social trends, like how "low calorie" supplanted "low fat" in 2013, and how Covid and the Ukraine war coincided with increased searches on anxiety. Rogers focuses mainly on unearthing uplifting patterns, like how careers "that help people" have been more popular than those "that pay well" since 2020, and how, during disasters, searches always evolve from attempts to understand the threat to attempts to proactively navigate it. He even casts frequent searches about depression and miscarriages in a positive light, as they reveal people yearning to grapple effectively with life's most difficult challenges. Unfortunately, Rogers sometimes seems to misread questions, like when he frames "how often can I donate plasma" as evidence of altruism instead of financial desperation, or parses "does bereavement include uncles" to not be a question about work leave but rather what is socially acceptable grief. The result is a fun if shallow tour of the modern world's most burning questions.
