What We Ask Google

Intimate, touching, momentous and downright human

Intimate, touching, momentous and downright human

This view from the other side of the search box is both charming and insightful, tapping into a deep well of curiosity.

In a time when the news is so relentlessly gloomy, this book provides a ray of hope .

Entertaining and enlightening

What We Ask Google is a deeply human window into our shared curiosity , and the future it is already creating. By analysing billions of the searches, Rogers reveals how those patterns – when seen at scale – offer a rare, data-driven understanding of who we are and how societies respond to uncertainty. This is the most honest portrait of humanity you’ll ever read.

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.

Simon Rogers is Google’s Data Editor, leading a team of data journalists, analysts, and visualisers 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 (2013, Faber & Faber), based on the Guardian’s Datablog which he helped launch. A lecturer in Data Journalism at Medill-Northwestern University in San Francisco, he has received the Royal Statistical Society’s award for statistical excellence in journalism and been named Best UK Internet Journalist by the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford.