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 giant’s data editor Simon Rogers to create a “surprisingly hopeful picture of humankind” (that’s the subtitle) from searches performed over the past two decades. “Why do babies get hiccups?” we ask. “When do babies teethe?” “Why do toddlers bite?” “How do you know if your child has ADHD?” “How to tell kids about divorce?”
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.
“If you care enough to search for something, that has to mean something, even if that care only lasts as long as it takes to say the query,” he argues. “And what if it does mean something more? Something real and deep and meaningful about who we are as humans?”
His collation, which he organises in themed chapters that are also peppered with biography, as well as lists and graphs, ranges from the purely trivial (“How to fold a burrito” has always been more searched than “How to fold trousers” – except briefly in 2019 when a Marie Kondo show was big on Netflix) to the occasionally poignant.
Many search trends are inexplicable. Why, for example, are Austrians, Nigerians and Canadians most likely to ask about back pain at night? Why are people in Kansas most likely to ask Google how to spell “chaos”, whereas their neighbours in Missouri are most commonly stumped by “unconscious”?
Where he can, Rogers brings context to the quirks. So beyond predictable queries in the parenting chapter, for example, we learn that, in early 2023, search interest in “take care of parents” overtook “take care of kids” – evidence of the demographic squeeze on the “sandwich generation” now looking after young kids and ageing parents.
It’s fun to peer into the minds of searchers whose base level of knowledge may have been lacking; my favourite illustration is a map of the US in which the narrow path of the 2024 solar eclipse neatly arcs across regions where searches with the terms “eyes” and “hurt” peaked later that day.
Rogers also searches for the profound in chapters about family and grief. But ultimately the book struggles to say anything that deep or meaningful. It also feels like a rose-tinted view of the role of the internet – and Google itself – by a company man (Rogers joined Google in 2015 from Twitter, where he was data editor for two years after leaving the Guardian).
I suspect he was overtaken by events, but there is scant acknowledgment of the impact of the AI revolution on how we search and how Google presents the results (or, indeed, the knock-on effects of AI search summaries on the sites that people no longer click through to). The extensive bits on parenting, and parenting anxieties, meanwhile, barely hint at the role of big tech in fuelling those worries. And there’s nothing about politics or Donald Trump, Silicon Valley’s beloved president (Google chiefs are among the tech bosses who have cosied up to him). Nor do we spend much time dwelling on humankind’s darkest instincts, which I have no doubt are reflected in 20 years of search histories.
At one point, Rogers’ admirably charitable worldview trips him up. He presents the consistently high frequency of the search “How often can you donate plasma?” as a signal of our insatiable desire to help strangers, rather than evidence of the gross inequities of the US health industry, where paid plasma donation centres tend to cluster in poor areas.
What’s left is a diverting if selective window on collective curiosity that deserves a place on any bathroom bookshelf. Just beware “dead butt”, or gluteal amnesia, a symptom of our ever more sedentary lifestyles that, we now know, is steadily rising up the search rankings.
• What We Ask Google: A Surprisingly Hopeful Picture of Humankind by Simon Rogers is published by Torva (£16.99). To support the Guardian, buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
