We spend so much of our lives performing on social media, curating our greatest hits and professional milestones. But where do we go when we genuinely just want to understand the world — or admit that we have no idea what we are doing?
As a data editor at Google, I spend my days looking at the world’s largest publicly available dataset. To me, it’s the world’s brain, represented in data. It provides a unique window into what people have been thinking about for the past two decades.
The data is unfailingly honest. The way we search collectively is simply not the way we present ourselves on social media. There’s no such thing as a “dumb query,” and analyzing these massive trends gives us a highly accurate reflection of our shared curiosities.
When analyzing the trillions of queries made every year, incredible patterns emerge. Here are three of the most revealing questions people ask — and the surprising insights they reveal about who we really are.
1. ‘How to boil an egg’ (and other basic life skills)
If you look at the most-asked questions of all time, worldwide, you might expect complex metaphysical queries. While “What is love?” does make the top 10, the list is overwhelmingly dominated by the mundane.
“How to boil an egg” is consistently one of the top-searched “How to…” questions about food worldwide. We also constantly search for things like “How to fix a toilet” or “How to fix a door.”
It’s easy to look at this data and conclude that we are losing our basic life skills, that we sometimes forget how to do fairly basic grown-up tasks. But these queries can sound like they come from the sweet, innocent ignorance of our teens, even when asked by adults.
There’s a very hopeful human trait buried in this data. Search provides a non-judgmental environment for us to admit what we don’t know. The fact that millions of people are typing these basic questions means that even when we are completely clueless, we are actively willing to learn and improve ourselves.
The way we view our careers has shifted dramatically over the past few years, and Google Trends data confirms this on a massive scale. We turn to Search for guidance on professional hurdles, quietly asking questions like “How to ask for a raise,” “How to ask for feedback,” or “How to ask for a letter of recommendation.”
And for years, one of the top career-related searches was predictably “careers that pay well.”
There’s strong evidence that in the post-pandemic world, people are looking for more fulfilling paths. Recently, we have seen a profound movement in the data: Searches for a “job that helps people” have actually overtaken searches for a “job that pays well.” The top role-related searches in this category are for careers like therapist, social worker and psychologist.
As much as we worry about our financial futures, our aggregated searches prove a collective desire to contribute meaningfully to society.
We’re constantly told that the internet highlights our most selfish, divided or angry impulses. But the search data strongly contradicts the idea that human beings are only interested in looking after themselves.
Searches for “How to help…” have never been higher than they are right now. In both the U.S. and the U.K., the top-searched query in this category for the last decade has been “How to help someone with depression,” followed closely by anxiety and panic attacks. It’s a reminder that while search is a starting point, professional medical or mental health support may be essential when someone is struggling.
When we see someone struggling, our collective first instinct is to want to help — we just don’t always know where to begin. Whether it is a global crisis or a friend going through a tough time, we turn to the internet for advice on how to be there for others.
We often think our anxieties, our midnight worries, or our lack of basic knowledge isolate us from everyone else. But if you take one thing away from this data, make it this: You are not on your own.
You are not the only person searching for how to boil an egg, or how to ask for a raise, or how to comfort a grieving loved one. We are humans, after all. We’re not perfect, but we really do have more in common than we may think.
Simon Rogers is the author of “What We Ask Google: A Surprisingly Hopeful Picture of Humankind.” As Google’s data editor, he leads team of data journalists, analysts and visualizers to tell stories. Previously, he was Twitter’s first ever data editor, and he is also the author of “Facts Are Sacred.”
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