What We Ask Google A Surprisingly Hopeful History of Humankind

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.

Simon Rogers is Google’s data editor, leading a team of data journalists, analysts, and visualizers to tell stories with Google’s data. Previously, he was Twitter’s first ever data editor, and he is also the author of Facts Are Sacred, based on The Guardian’s Datablog, which he helped launch. A lecturer in Data Journalism at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism in San Francisco, he has received the Royal Statistical Society’s award for statistical excellence in journalism. He lives with his family in San Francisco.