About a month after the outbreak of the war in West Asia, Google searches surged for “LPG prices” and “induction cooktops”, shifting away from “flight cancellations” and “Middle East airspace”. People’s online search behaviour could be read as a snapshot of what they were feeling and indicated how the war miles away had entered the country’s kitchens.
In What We Ask Google: A Surprisingly Hopeful History of Humankind, Google’s data editor Simon Rogers delves into billions of queries to capture a shared arc in real-time human intent and how it has evolved since 2004. However, the author’s uni-dimensional focus on statistical summaries, narrated through a warm lens, settles into snackable trivia rather than an engaging story about the complex and digitised world we live in.
Across 10 thematic chapters, Rogers turns a record of unfiltered human curiosity, anxiety, desire, and empathy into a largely enjoyable read. He successfully maps some shifts in the world, such as search interest in “take care of parents” overtaking “take care of kids” in 2023 and more interest in “low calorie” food/drinks after 2013 compared to “low fat” in the preceding decade, pinpointing when structural changes in demography or diets began to shape online behaviour.
Through several such examples—people searching for how to calm pets during a storm or how the words “baby” and “sleep” spike around 2am—the author attempts to find common threads across different people, places, and situations. He opines that humanity has a lot more in common than one would think.
Rogers sparingly delves into the reasons behind particular search trends. For instance, he traces the search spike in “How to say thank you for an unexpected gift” in Niger to a cultural way of life. Nigeriens don’t let anyone leave empty-handed, and he wonders if the English-speaking aid workers visiting the country made these queries to acknowledge gifts from its citizens. It’s a hypothesis he draws though, not one substantiated by any research.
In another instance, Rogers traces how searches for food banks and similar terms were higher in the US and the UK during the post-pandemic high-inflation period, and how these trends could predict wider economic issues—providing real-time signals until official data is released. A spike in searches for Ukrainian food in 2022 in Poland, Canada, Ireland and the UK occurred after migration to these countries took place soon after the outbreak of the war with Russia.
However, the book doesn’t offer any revelations—there isn’t anything surprising about parents frantically looking to get their toddler to sleep in the middle of the night. The nature of the data, which is anonymous, limits further exploration. For example, there is no way to know whether the 2 am searches are being done by women or men, or if men’s participation has increased in recent years.
Mind the gap
Beyond the understandable limitations of Google search data, the author has also kept the scope narrower than what was needed for more nuanced storytelling, by his own admission. In the chapter Why is my poo green?, Rogers writes about his experience of searching for answers online when his “left eye was filled with floating spots”. It prompted him to see a doctor and get laser surgery the same night. However, anyone who has ever used the internet can attest to the general frustration over a lack of accurate information on health-related queries.
Rogers sidesteps addressing the accuracy of search results—and the potential harm they could do—by adding this disclaimer: “This is not a chapter about the results we get when we search. It is, however, about what we look for.”
This is a lacuna felt throughout the book. Rogers chooses not to address complex issues about how helpful and accurate Google search results are, how artificial intelligence is reshaping the way people search, and how commodification and monetisation of data in a digitised world are influencing human behaviour.
His assertion that collective human experience has a lot to be hopeful about is sincere, but it ignores other dimensions of the story. The very same private and anonymous confessions or searches about love, grief, disease and pregnancy that form the basis of the book are also used to identify behaviours and target users with advertisements. The book’s anthropic storytelling is silent on tech monopolies, people’s anxieties and desires being used to extract economic value.
What We Ask Google comes at a time when AI is fundamentally changing traditional search models. Users previously typed in keywords to land on a page; AI now offers them a quick summary. AI-generated content is making online interactions algorithmic, diluting authentic human instinct.
The book acknowledges AI integration, but its razor-sharp focus on search behaviour limits any exploration of how our online interactions could be shaped in the future.
Ultimately, What We Ask Google is not a critique of the role technology and algorithms play in shaping behaviours in a digitised society. Rogers makes a sincere attempt to weave billions of data points into a story of common human instincts, but it is aimed more at evoking nostalgia than addressing harsh realities.