'What we ask Google' offers intriguing insights, but few fresh revelations

For at least three generations now, Google is like a second conscience. Simon Rogers, data editor at Google, mines our search data for clues into who we are becoming

What We Ask Google: A Surprisingly Hopeful Picture of Humankind

By Simon Rogers

Published by Penguin Random House UK

271 pages  ₹999

 

From time to time, reports on Google search data make the rounds in the news cycle. What is it about the Google Trends data that makes it so appealing as an object of curiosity and scrutiny? Is it the ubiquity of Google in our everyday lives now — the word became a verb for searching on the internet a long time ago, and it’s the first reflex most of us have when confronted with a problem big or small. From “how to register a company in India’ to ‘weather today’, Google is almost like a second conscience now for at least three generations, and it’s precisely this phenomenon that Simon Rogers, data editor at Google, deals with in his new book What We Ask Google. 

The book has 10 chapters based on the themes that they largely deal with: From everyday tasks such as cooking to scientific curiosity to seeking help regarding the deeper issues of life such as grief and love. These themes also represent the categories under which a major chunk of Google searches fall, offering a glimpse into the world in which we live together and how it has evolved since 2004, the year Google Trends data began. Mr Rogers heavily relies on data from the United States (US) and the United Kingdom when he offers his analyses of what he sees in his everyday work, so the book might not offer a lot of insights for readers who are not from those two countries. 

In the introduction, the author goes into detail about how search data is aggregated and emphasises that he “could not tell you how an individual searches even if I wanted to”. Is this a subtle way of assuaging fears about online privacy and how an individual’s digital behaviour is in effect a blueprint for targeted advertising and other sinister phenomena associated with contemporary internet? 

Mr Rogers also makes a case for the Google Trends data as the “most powerful dataset on earth”. The first reason he gives is that since users are not restricted by public performance, as on much of social media these days, they present a more authentic version of how they are living their lives through what they search for. The second reason is a bit more technical — “immediacy” — with the author claiming that it is possible to see spikes in search interests that have happened within the last five minutes at any time. 

Much of the optimism in the book (its subtitle is “A surprisingly hopeful picture of humankind”) stems from the observation that searches for “how to help…” have never been higher than in the mid-2020s. Mr Rogers writes that even though the world “may appear to be more polarised”, the fact that more and more people are searching for methods to help others offers an optimistic direction to understand “what it means to be part of society in the twenty-first century”. What he neglects to mention is that more individuals have access to the internet than any other point in history — governments actively try to include more people in the digital world, an internet connection is pretty affordable in many parts of the globe, and after the pandemic, entire industries have shifted online. Just because one corner of the internet offers a hopeful look at the world cannot necessarily mean that it is not a big reason many countries are seeing a rise in polarisation. This is not Mr Rogers or Google’s headache, of course, but to claim that the searches for helping offer a “surprisingly hopeful picture” is perhaps a tad simplistic. 

The book doesn’t delve enough into how artificial intelligence (AI) is impacting search, especially since the top of the first page of results for a question-based Google search now offers users an AI-generated summary. The author merely says that the advent of AI has brought about longer queries, and that there is a “kind of cognitive offloading emerging where people are increasingly using it to make major life decisions”, which include their finances and relationships. 

From the interest in health-related searches to people figuring out how to adjust to a world where working from home is a “new normal”, What We Ask Google offers an interesting look at how the internet has evolved post the Covid-19 pandemic, which redefined the internet for societies everywhere. However, beyond this and the cool graphics, the book offers nothing ground-breaking for readers interested in the sociology of technology and the internet.