What We Ask Google by Simon Rogers review โ the secrets of our search history
The companyโs data editor trawls through billions of queries to deliver a portrait of the worldโs preoccupations As anyone who has procreated this century knows, childrearing involves daily rounds of online searching. The most common parenting-related queries feature in What We Ask Google, a valiant attempt by the search giantโs data editor Simon Rogers to create a โsurprisingly hopeful picture of humankindโ (thatโs the subtitle) from searches performed over the past two decades. โWhy do babies get hiccups?โ we ask. โWhen do babies teethe?โ โWhy do toddlers bite?โ โHow do you know if your child has ADHD?โ โHow to tell kids about divorce?โ Since 2006, engineers have used Google Trends to make sense of common (and anonymised) queries like these, going back as far as 2004, when phones were dumb and less than half of UK households had internet access. Rogers, a British former Guardian journalist based in California, views the results as a kind of social mirror. Continue reading...