The Questions We Ask When We Need Help
For many people, Google has become the first place they turn when they need help.
For more than two decades, people have searched for answers to questions they might never ask another person: questions about love, parenting, health, grief, friendship, anxiety, curiosity, and kindness. Together, these searches have created one of the largest records of human curiosity ever assembled.
In What We Ask Google, Simon Rogers uses two decades of search data to uncover the questions that connect people across cultures and continents. What emerges is a portrait of people grappling with remarkably similar hopes, fears, and uncertainties. Despite differences in geography, politics, language, and culture, people repeatedly turn to Google to ask the same fundamental questions: How do I find love? Why am I so tired? How do I help my child? Why does grief feel so lonely? How can I help?
The findings are often surprising. Around the world, it is often 2 a.m. when parents turn to Google asking how to get their babies to sleep. People search to understand their bodies, their relationships, their children, their pets, and the world around them, but they also search for ways to help. One of Rogers’ most striking discoveries is how often people turn to Google not just with questions about themselves, but with questions about supporting others.
Whether it’s figuring out why a dog eats grass, understanding grief, helping a bee, or learning how to boil an egg, these searches reveal the everyday questions that shape modern life. Through a combination of data analysis, storytelling, psychology, social observation, and cultural history, Rogers transforms billions of searches into an illuminating portrait of people at their most curious, vulnerable, and hopeful.
Why This Book Matters
- The World’s Largest Diary: An exploration of billions of anonymous searches that capture humanity’s most honest questions, concerns, and aspirations.
- The Questions We Don’t Always Ask Out Loud: From love and loneliness to parenting, health, grief, and self-doubt, the book explores the deeply personal questions people turn to Google for when they need help.
- A New Lens on Human Behaviour: Search data offers a unique way of understanding how people respond to uncertainty, change, relationships, health, and everyday life.
- A Surprisingly Hopeful Dataset: At a time when public discourse is dominated by division, search behaviour often reveals curiosity, generosity, empathy, and common ground.
- Twenty Years of Human Behaviour: A fascinating record of how people have responded to major social, cultural, technological, and personal changes since the dawn of the search age.
Early Praise
“This view from the other side of the search box is both charming and insightful, tapping into a deep well of curiosity.”
— Tim Harford, author of How to Make the World Add Up
“Entertaining and enlightening.”
— Hal Varian, Former Chief Economist for Google
“What We Ask Google is a deeply human window into our shared curiosity, and the future it is already creating. By analysing billions of 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.”
— Amy Webb, author of The Signals Are Talking and The Big Nine
About the Author
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 founded Guardian Data at The Guardian before becoming Twitter’s first-ever Data Editor. He is also the author of Facts Are Sacred (Faber & Faber). A lecturer in Data Journalism at Medill-Northwestern University in San Francisco, Rogers has received the Royal Statistical Society’s award for statistical excellence in journalism and was named Best UK Internet Journalist by the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford.
