What We Ask Google: A Surprisingly Hopeful History of Humankind
Author: Simon Rogers
Date: 2026-05-05 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: History; Social History; Computers; Internet; Search Engines; Social Science; Statistics
Description: Ever wondered what goes through other people’s minds—their silly questions, their inner anxieties, hopes, and dreams? In What We Ask Google, Simon Rogers explores insights from the world’s biggest an epic snapshot, two decades long and counting, of our collective brain. What it reveals about us might surprise you. Every June, for instance, the world sees a spike in searches for “How to help a bee.” Reassuringly, people consistently want to know, “How often can you donate plasma?” And despite superficial differences (such as the deeply divided world map of cat people vs. dog people), humanity h
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Text copyright © 2026 by Simon Rogers

Illustrations copyright © 2026 by Nigel Holmes

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rogers, Simon, 1967– author

Title: What we ask Google: a surprisingly hopeful history of humankind / Simon Rogers; illustrations by Nigel Holmes.

Description: New York, NY: Plume, [2026] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2025054978 | ISBN 9798217176984 hardcover | ISBN 9798217176991 ebook

Subjects: LCSH: Google Trends | Information behavior | Web search engines—Psychological aspects | Internet searching—Psychological aspects | Internet users—Psychology | LCGFT: Trivia and miscellanea

Classification: LCC ZA4234.G64 R64 2026

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025054978

Ebook ISBN 9798217176991

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Contents

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction: When we ask for help

Glossary

1   “Why am I so tired?”

2   “How to ask politely”

3   “How to boil an egg”

4   “Why is my poo green?”

5   “Why does my dog eat grass?”

6   “How does gravity work?”

7   “What does love feel like?”

8   “Why do toddlers bite?”

9   “Why is grief so lonely?”

10   “How can I help?”

Appendix

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Appendix: Image Description

About the Author

_155977298_

Dedicated to
Liza, Ella, and Jake,
and to
Janet and Michael Rogers

We are the music makers,

And we are the dreamers of dreams

—“Ode,” from Music and Moonlight, by Arthur O’Shaughnessy

Introduction

When we ask for help

Imagine you are about to be hit by one of the worst storms in history. What runs through your head? Well, I can actually tell you.

August 2017: Hurricane Harvey is barreling toward Texas and Louisiana. It will cause devastation to everything in its path, leading to the loss of over a hundred lives. While preparing for the storm, battening down hatches and stockpiling emergency supplies, some Texans paused to search Google for something, something personal and understandable and very, very human: “How to calm a dog in a storm.”

For me, this encapsulates perfectly how we search. We want to comprehend a catastrophic weather event, or an election, or a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, but we also really want to understand how it affects us and the people (or pets) we care about. Asking Google for help is not something we do instead of interacting with fellow humans; it’s often something we do in service to ourselves and others. Search is part of our social world.

As data editor at Google, my job is to glean insights from the mountain of search data. When I first asked Google something, the internet was already big enough to be confusingly huge. Now, decades later, I feel lucky to be working with a team analyzing those results every day. Some days I also feel like an archaeologist, uncovering unknown truths about who we are. And I want to share that feeling with you.

Originally, the title of this book was going to be What We Ask Google (when we ask for help). Google Trends is our window into that world. Available to everyone through a public tool, it takes a random sample of the billions of searches that happen each day and categorizes them so that my team and I can see how a town or a state or a country searches. But that’s it. The data is anonymous and aggregated—I could not tell you how an individual searches even if I wanted to. What we can do, however, is show how we all search collectively. It’s arguably the biggest publicly available dataset in existence and can reasonably claim to represent humanity across the world. And that provides a unique window into what people have been thinking about for the past twenty years and more—not just what, but where and when.

Of course, there are geographical limits. First, the searches are aggregated down to city level, but no further. And where access to Google is limited, as it is in China, the data is not going to tell us anything useful. The same goes for places where there are not many people. Yet it is still the most powerful dataset on earth, because of two other things: honesty and immediacy.

Honesty, because the way we search is not the way we present ourselves on social media. There’s no such thing as a dumb query, or anything too embarrassing to search for (check out chapter 4).

Immediacy, because we can see spikes in search interest that have occurred within the past five minutes. We see searches each day that reflect something that just happened. One minute we may be looking for a job opening or a recipe, the next we hear something on the news and want to fact-check it to see if it really did just happen.

Did you know that searches including “?” are at a higher number now than at any time in the internet’s history? The same is true of “question words”—who, what, where, when, why, how. It appears that in English at least, we often ask questions in proper sentences, with punctuation and everything. And it doesn’t matter how simple, or deep, or empathetic, or nonsensical the question might be. Search reflects who we are. It’s why “Get my baby to sleep” spikes around two a.m. Sometimes it doesn’t make any sense at face value, but it reflects the ephemeral nature of our moods and concerns. For instance, we search for both taxes and holiday rentals in the afternoon—perhaps we are dealing with our home admin, and wishing we were having a break somewhere instead. And it’s why we search for pain, insomnia, and friendship at night.

Imagine that, one day, aliens descend on New York and want to get a true understanding of who these humans are and what matters to them. Google search is the dataset that could give them some inkling into how we live our lives.

It is the world’s brain, represented in data.

* * *

Which leads us to the question: with billions of searches happening every day, where do we start?

I sometimes get asked if my job is depressing, often by friends imagining that search data must represent the worst of humanity. They suggest it’s all queries that reveal people as bigoted or selfish or nasty or mean. It is, after all, a mirror of society.

But, as I always tell those friends, I don’t find my job depressing, I find it hopeful.

This is not a book about the content of the internet, or whether that content is good or bad. This is a book about humans’ innate curiosity: what we ask when we have access to the world’s knowledge, and what it shows about what we have in common around the world.

One of the reasons I find it so hopeful is because so much of search is about helping. Searches for “How to help…” have never been higher than they are right now, in the world of the mid-2020s, as I am writing this book—and helping is part of what connects us to one another. What is striking about the data is that often searches are not only about helping ourselves, but helping others. Those top searches include “How to help anxiety” and even just “How to help people.” It can reflect powerlessness—we ask for help because we don’t know what to do, especially for those we care for. Searches for “How to help someone with depression” always feature in the top-searched queries, as does “How to help someone having a panic attack.” But even if we don’t always know exactly where to start, the data strongly contradicts the idea that human beings are only interested in looking after themselves.

When there’s a natural disaster, we search for how to help or donate to a cause. In the days after the wildfire on the Hawaiian island of Maui in 2023, for instance, the top-trending search on donations across all of Google was “Maui fire donation.” And we see this pattern repeat itself every time there is a huge natural disaster.

Another top search, even when there isn’t a disaster to dominate the news coverage, is, “How often can you donate plasma?”

My personal favorite (which may be the most English search ever) is the summer spike in searches in the UK for “How to help a bee.”

We may appear to be more polarized than ever before, yet this theme of trying to help others comes through again and again in the data. Every day, the world searches for how to help the victims of a natural disaster, or a war, or economic collapse. The irony is that while we may feel more isolated than we used to (I checked: we do), we are in fact all searching for the same things, and this data can help foster an understanding of what it means to be part of society in the twenty-first century.

* * *

Google’s chief economist Hal Varian and Yossi Matias, then vice president of engineering and head of the Israel Engineering Center, first came up with the idea of a tool that could tap into the zeitgeist in the early 2000s. Thanks to Yossi’s Tel Aviv–based team of engineers, Google Trends became real for the first time—launched in 2006 with data going back to 2004. By the following year it included daily trends. And by 2015, when I joined Google, it was relaunched with real-time data, meaning you can see what the world was searching just a few moments earlier.

The fact that this data can be mined by anyone and is even remotely useful is due to something you may never even have heard of: the Google Knowledge Graph. This is a collection of more than 500 billion facts about over five billion topics (or “entities” as they’re referred to by Google). And it powers Google search. Why is it important? When you search for “Lincoln,” for instance, are you searching for the sixteenth US president, the city in England, or the luxury American car brand? Search tries to work out what you’re really looking for so you can get the best results. The Knowledge Graph is also a way of categorizing people’s searches so that Google Trends can help us analyze the data properly. It includes searches in different languages, slang references, common misspellings—all the different ways we might search for the same idea. It’s how we can search for love in Uganda and Brazil and compare the two. It’s what gives the data a real resonance.

By the time you read this, the Google Trends dataset could easily represent a sample of trillions of queries, equivalent to hundreds of queries per adult on the planet. Imagine if we had a survey with responses from every adult on earth. What could that tell us about what we care about day to day?

Now, two decades after it was launched, the data is used by newsrooms to turn real-time insights into news stories showing how the world cares about the big issues. Content creators use it to generate ideas for social videos, and NGOs use it to monitor searches from crisis-hit regions. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has used it for real-time economic forecasting, based on some research that Hal produced into what economists call “nowcasting”—basically, very short-term forecasting. In this case, nowcasting is the idea that we can use Google Trends in real time to predict movements in the economy, that a shift in searches for “jobless claims,” for example, would show a spike before unemployment figures started moving upward. As Hal says, Google searches are a “leading indicator,” just as building permits are leading indicators of future construction, or searches for “holiday in Italy” are a leading indicator of future tourists in Tuscany.

The OECD has produced its own research about using Google Trends to predict economic variables. The team even used it to produce a weekly tracker of one of the most significant indicators of how an economy is doing: gross domestic product. GDP, as most people refer to it, is how governments measure the strength of their economies. Traditionally the figures are available only once every three months. But what if economists could use Google Trends to produce a weekly guide to GDP? So that’s what they did. The OECD Weekly Tracker of GDP combined machine learning and Google Trends data to track every G20 country’s economy each week, compared to the same week the year before, across topics such as consumption, labor markets, housing, trade, industrial activity, and economic uncertainty. If a single search is a bit like a drop of water amid a torrential rainstorm, Trends data is more like a weather report.

* * *

“Hey Google, what’s the weather today?”

Millions of people start every morning the same way. You can live in Nairobi or LA, London or Seoul, and at the very least you will have searching for the weather in common. Will it be cold or warm; will you need an umbrella or snowshoes?

Since 1998, the way we search has transformed, from hammering short queries into keyboards to speaking to devices in our home or on our phones. Most recently, search is enhanced with AI to summarize those queries and aggregate results into the most accessible form possible. This revolution is in its early stages, but we can see the data shifting already. For one thing, queries are getting longer as we interact with AI in search in a more precise way. Where before we might have said “Vietnamese restaurants near me,” now you might phrase it “Show me Vietnamese restaurants near me that would be suitable for celebrating a birthday party and where I could bring my own cake.” Plus there is a kind of cognitive off-loading emerging where people are increasingly using it to help them make major life decisions around financial planning, or even to get advice on their personal relationships. Where before we might have gone down the search rabbit hole ourselves, now we have help to do it for us. And we can even use image generation to see ourselves in a particular item of clothing (or to create a version of your dog as Superdog from Superman, as I did recently). A future version of this book might look completely different. But while the technology behind search has developed over time, the rhythm of some searches is remarkably consistent. This data is both micro and macro: we want to understand what the weather is going to be like where we are, but we also want to know if climate change is the reason why tropical storm searches are higher now than ever before. Every day we ask questions like “Is it going to rain today?” and “What is the difference between weather and climate?” and “What is the weather in…?” (We also search for how to protect our pets from a deluge.) It is often said that people only think about how things affect them. Actually, we routinely think about both the world at large and our place within it.

The reason this matters so much for understanding Google Trends is that we’re always looking for things we can use as a comparison. Weather searches give us a baseline to understand how significant a different search is. That TV show you’re binge-watching? I want to know how it compares to the weather—that will tell us how much it really matters. Take September 2021, for instance, when the hit Korean TV show Squid Game actually peaked higher than queries about rain, across the world.

Lots of daily searches are rhythmic, like checking the weather every morning. But humans are endlessly surprising, and even after gathering Trends data for years, it still astonishes me how some 15% of all Google searches each day are brand-new, never seen before. It’s hard to imagine any other dataset where a significant proportion would be new and would change each day, seemingly forever. It is the paradox at the heart of who we are: humans really are unique, and our searches prove that, yet we often share the same moments in remarkably similar ways. We all look up at the same sky.

So what do we ask when we ask Google a question? Here, for the first time ever, are the all-time top twenty questions asked around the world. There are some caveats: these are queries in English, because question searches don’t apply in all languages (they’re pretty rare in Japanese, for instance), and they encompass the period from 2004 to 2024. But they give a real sense of what mattered to people over those twenty years.

What I love most about these results is also what we have most in common: there is a lot of stuff we really just do not know how to do. If you’re not tying a tie every day, for instance (and who does nowadays?), then it’s easy to see how it would be simple to forget the process. Some of the queries are huge metaphysical issues—“What is love?”—while others are those everyday questions that just flummox us repeatedly. Or “Where am I?,” which may feel abstract but in reality could simply be an attempt to establish your location in maps by using search to do it.

Then there’s Chuck Norris. The American action movie star and martial artist became part of a much-loved meme in the 2010s. We spend a lot of our time trying to make each other laugh.

When you work with this data every day, as I do, you can see how no one is truly alone in their emotions. What happened to you today happened to millions of other people yesterday and will hit millions more tomorrow. There are lots of things that are unique about the human experience, but this aggregated Google Trends data shows us how we are interconnected in a way that’s hard to conceive otherwise.

* * *

I like to think my life and family history have been unique. My great-grandfather Stanton Bunting was a young infantryman with the Middlesex Regiment at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. His job was to throw smoke grenades over the top of the trench wall, and he was injured, blown into a shell hole while stepping over his comrades’ bodies to get back to the rear lines. He was lucky to survive, although he was diagnosed with “shell shock”—that First World War euphemism for the psychological effects of combat stress. Under a year later he was back on the front line and transferred to the Royal Flying Corps, becoming an observer and gunner in a Bristol F.2b Fighter. He is actually credited as an ace for having shot down seven aircraft. In 1939, when war broke out again, he found himself back in the Royal Air Force in France, in the same fields where his friends had died. It must have broken him. Stanton suffered blackouts, which meant he spent the rest of the war as an adjutant, and never flew again. It was hard for me to reconcile what I learned from his military records with the tall, distinguished, gentle man dressed in a suit and bow tie who never talked about his time in the mud of France and was never treated for what would now surely be recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder. I have a couple of memories of him that stay with me: he once told me that being kind was the most important attribute to have in life; and he drove his maroon Triumph 2000 so slowly through the streets of Eastbourne that long lines would form behind him, each driver honking their horn in annoyance.

His son-in-law, our grandfather Ted Lloyd, was a film cameraman who knew Orson Welles. Ted had also been the clapper boy on Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film The 39 Steps. He got his start by making his own movie camera and walking into the Gaumont-British film studios with it in 1932. Ted’s glamorous role took him and our grandmother Beryl (and their three daughters) around the globe. My dad’s father, Ted Rogers, was an anti-tank gunner badly burned in the Tunisian desert during the Battle of Mareth in 1943. He went on to become a peace campaigner and sailed the world with my grandmother Enid. They had three sons, one of whom, Frank, died in a car crash when he was seventeen. All of which makes Ted’s positive approach to life the more impressive: he had suffered horrific injuries and lost his youngest son but continued to believe in a better world.

My parents met and married in the early 1960s (around the same time as Doctor Who began, as Dad told us) and had two sons. I became a journalist in the early 1990s and met my future partner, whose parents had grown up in Guyana and moved to cold, damp Britain in the 1960s. We have two children of mixed heritage and emigrated from the UK to the US a decade ago, where we still live today.

But what is really unique about my family story? About five million Britons served in the First World War, another three million in the Second World War. There were 250,000 acknowledged British shell shock cases treated in the First World War, and the Royal Flying Corps had a strength of 46,000 by 1918. There are around 19,000 Guyana-born Britons, according to the Office for National Statistics, and 3% of the population of England and Wales is mixed-race. In 2013, 990,000 people received green cards in the US.

Orson Welles did have a lot of friends, but I think we get to keep that one as fairly unusual.

The point is that none of these facts alone tells our story. My family is not unique in having grandparents who served, or parents who were immigrants. What makes us us is the combination of all of those moments. Lots of people could tell individual parts of this story; nobody else could tell the same complete family tale.

Similarly, you may not learn something entirely new about humanity by knowing that lots of people search for “How to make pancakes” or “How to make slime.” But what about when we look at all these search trends together in one place?

Data analysts talk about quantitative and qualitative data as two different, complementary types of figures. Quantitative, or “quant,” is the stuff that most people think of as data—large-scale, with potentially millions of data points. It lends itself to analysis and can be based on, say, a survey. We are surrounded by this kind of data. Economic reports, the census—it’s all “quant.”

Then there’s qualitative data, or “qual.” This could be a focus group or a set of interviews. It provides the color and detail the larger analysis can’t, that sense of real people with real lives, preferences, and values.

The remarkable thing about Google Trends is that it provides qualitative data in quantitative quantities.

Now try saying that fast.

Even as I type this, the dataset is changing from moment to moment, just as our own interests do. By the time you read this, some of the Google Trends in this book will have changed. The samples shift constantly, and what we are catching are snapshots, moments in time. Something will have happened in the world and the top-searched questions will have changed or some of the smaller queries will be ranked differently. This is not some static dataset but an ever-changing engine of insights.

To be fair, most big datasets shift—it’s why official data is constantly being revised and recounted. It’s why “confidence intervals” exist. That number of Guyana-born British people above? That has a confidence interval of +/−8,000 people. So the true number could potentially be 27,000 or 11,000. Official data is constantly being weighted to ensure it is representative, even the census, which is theoretically a count of everyone in the country but still has to take into account those who have been missed. Essentially, official data is the least worst guess an organization can make. Many organizations have gotten pretty good at making such estimates, but they are still just that: estimates.

Trends is a different kind of data, a shifting stream of queries and issues that represent who we are at the exact moment in time you are looking at it. One day we will have the skills to fully understand what it represents. Until then, this book is a step in that direction. Think of it as a photograph of a moment—a family portrait of the twenty-first century, a snapshot, two decades long and counting in the long history of humanity.

* * *

In the coming chapters we will delve into the sublime and the mundane, and reveal how we all share in the effort to work out these parts of our lives. What is each of our lives really about, on the global scale? It’s about how to know if someone likes you, and how to kiss if they do. It’s about falling in love and having a baby. It’s about dealing with grief and the desire to help others. It’s about cooking and cleaning and wondering what to wear when we leave the house, or how to know if we’re healthy. It’s about everything from boiling an egg to the size of the universe. It is about the common connections we all have.

Life, as John Lennon sang, is what happens to us when we’re busy making other plans. When we are all dealing with love, loss, language, health, parenting, and everything else the modern world throws at us, this data can give us a unique insight into the life of humanity in the twenty-first century.

Our questions about the world are creating a global consciousness that reflects what we honestly care about each day. So when we need to help ourselves, or help others, we Google it—and then we can go back into the world as better humans.

Glossary

Words you will see in this book

Search interest—how Google Trends is measured. It is based on a random sample of normalized searches, which are categorized by topic and aggregated (or collected) together by city or country. The result is a number between 0 and 100, with 100 being the highest search interest.

“Top” or “most” searched—searched more than anything else in its category, e.g., “country music is the top-searched music genre.”

All-time high—something that peaks in search and is more searched in that moment than at any other time since 2004, which is when Google Trends data began.

Trending—accelerating in search, so if something is “top-trending” that means it accelerated faster in search than anything else. A spike in search is the percentage amount a query or topic has increased by over a specific time period.

1

“Why am I so tired?”

Google Trends began with ocean cruises. Back in 2005, Google chief economist Hal Varian noticed that when he analyzed search data there was a strong seasonal pattern to what he found. This happened with cruises, which is something you can do in different parts of the world at any time after all. And then he noticed that these patterns applied to lots of things: car sales and baseball and the economy. He was picking up on what we now call “rhythmic trends,” the fact that similar searches happen at similar times.

This is what tech writer John Battelle called a “database of intentions”: search data represents things we are interested in doing, although not necessarily instantly. For example, people start to search for a house months before they actually buy it. Holiday planning is the same, taking place perhaps weeks or months before you get on a plane. Those intentions can presage the future, or be nothing but a momentary interest, replaced by something else seconds later.

One of those rhythmic searches really does reflect the moment, that most everyday of questions: “What time is it?” It is by some measure one of the most-asked topics of all time on Google search. And the way we search about time says more about us than we might think. Learning to tell what time it is may be something we are taught in primary school, but in reality—as with most of the searches detailed in this book—it’s something we need help with, every day.

Searches for time are a “ubiquitous search”; like searches for the weather, they help provide structure for our day. We want to know what time the sun rises and what time it sets, for instance. And time-related searches spike twice a year when the clocks change—not only “When does the time change?” but also “Why does the time change?” “How much time?” reached an all-time high in search in 2024. Time is our most precious commodity, one we never seem to have enough of. Some of it is pretty meta too: “Is time real?” is the top-searched “Is…real?” (aside from “Is it real?,” which means nothing).

Searches for “What time is it?” are higher now than at any time in Google Trends history, and it is the top “What…” search on all of Google. They spiked when COVID hit in 2020 and they still spike when the clocks change, but the trend is always upward. Why is that? One explanation could be that in 2004 people mostly still wore watches to tell the time. (In Graham Greene’s novella The Tenth Man, a group of prisoners are tortured by the guards taking away their wristwatches, leaving them unmoored from the rest of the world.) Now, they ask search what the time is through their smart speakers and phones.

Time affects everything in search: we search differently in the morning compared to how we search at night, and we search differently in September than how we search in March.

For some, how to tell the time is a challenge. Take these “How to…” searches about time:

- How to tell the time with the sun

- How to tell the time drunk (it will come as no surprise to anyone on the streets of Soho at pub closing time that London is the top place on earth searching for this)

Or even this one: “I need a battery so I can tell the time.”

Time is our way of understanding the globe too. When I first moved to the West Coast of the US, I was endlessly confused about time and time zones. When was the best time to call London? When could I schedule that meeting with someone in São Paulo? What is the time difference with New York? Living in San Francisco and staying with friends, three hours behind New York and eight hours behind London, there would be a time in the evening when I knew no one in the world who was awake. Every day, I would often be the last person asleep and the last to wake up.

It’s isolating, a little, that feeling of being utterly alone in the world, if only for a few hours.

Time is really about location. Searches for “What time is it in…” are extremely common, with “What time is it in India?” being the top-searched globally. “Where is GMT time zone?” is the top “Where…” when people search for time.

Sometimes events trigger these searches. Often, when a popular TV show is airing, the time zone conversion will be trending; “2pm EST to PST” reached an all-time high during the Jake Paul vs. Tommy Fury fight in February 2023, for instance. And there are other examples too: “9pm EST to PST” reached an all-time high when the PS5 gaming console went on sale in November 2020; “time in Turkey” reached an all-time high during the Turkey–Syria earthquakes in February 2023; and “What time is it in Serbia?” more than tripled in June 2023, reaching an all-time high when the Denver Nuggets won the NBA Championship. Their star player was Nikola Jokić, who is from Serbia. “What time is it in Ukraine?” spiked +3,200% in February 2022 when Russia invaded the country, again reaching an all-time high.

“If I Could Turn Back Time”

“Why do we have daylight saving time?” and “Why do we have leap years?” are the top “Why…” questions when we search for time. About seventy countries around the globe go through the former twice a year, switching to daylight saving in the spring and then going back to standard time in the autumn. It is a major issue in search, which doesn’t lessen with the fact that we experience it every single year. We ask lots of “When…” questions as well.

We want to know who’s responsible too: “Who started daylight saving time?” is the top “Who…” when we search for time (for which we can thank the German government in 1916, during the First World War). It is obviously confusing for people, so much so that we might not even know where we are in this annual cycle. This shows up often enough that it’s reflected in the data: “Is it daylight saving time now?”

Then there’s the fact that the Cher song “If I Could Turn Back Time” has spiked every October with the time change since 2017.

And every year in March “Why am I so tired?” spikes when the clocks go forward an hour, robbing us of that precious sixty minutes (but not in Thailand, which does not observe the practice).

Tiredness doesn’t always strike when you might expect it. The search also spikes every late June/July, with the rate of search interest increasing every year. That may be because summer temperatures in both the US and the UK have increased over the past two decades, particularly at night, leading to increased fatigue. And late June includes the solstice, the longest day of the year.

“What is today?”

We might not realize it, but we are part of a community of people who search for a song or a recipe or even a cup of coffee at certain times every day and are never less alone when we search in this way, whether we know it or not.

At a very high level, we see a pattern to the year. Food searches spike in December and January. Travel searches are at their highest in the first half of the year. Fashion and beauty tend to be strong throughout the year. Each month, we see a few particular searches spiking, coming together to show us the year in search.

These aren’t necessarily the top searches in these months, but they do spike in search during them. The aliens in our introduction would learn a lot about people’s day-to-day lives from this annual pattern. We get thrown by the days of the week at the beginning of the year and obsess on diets and making soup in the cold weather. By February we’re thinking about Valentine’s Day and applying for summer internships. By the spring, teens are searching for how to ask someone to the prom, in the summer we’re worried about oily skin, and by the end of the year it’s the movie Die Hard and learning how to entertain relatives over the holidays. “How to play piano” searches have spiked every December in the US since 2006 (and in case you wanted to know, the top-trending piece to learn to play is “Someone Like You” by Adele).

Some of the searches seem to have originated in the US and may be showing up as cultural trends become more global. “Cuffing season” seems like one of those, a US term for when the weather starts to get cold and single people look for short-term romantic partners to cuddle up with and keep warm. It started spiking in search in 2022 and has become global—it’s actually more searched now in Canada and Norway than in the US.

This sketch of the year is timeless. While it doesn’t include elections, Olympics, natural disasters, or those high-profile moments that dominate the news (and search interest) every so often, it presents a set of searches that reflects who we are and how we search day to day. For many, these are the searches they remember and the ones that matter most to them in the moment.

It makes sense that there’s a calendar of the year. But did you know there’s also a calendar of the day? Wherever we are in the world, there are some searches that happen at roughly the same time every day. Yoga, for instance, is most searched in the morning, perhaps unsurprisingly. But it’s also the time when we search for the lottery. What do these rhythmic searches say about us? Why are the top countries searching for back pain at night Austria, Nigeria, Canada, and Colombia?

This is our search clock of the day:

This data is tricky. Basically it’s a selection of search terms, it’s not complete, and it represents life in the US at the moment we pulled the data. But I think it is quite emblematic of a shared experience that similar patterns in search would be reflected in different countries across the world. Some of the results show what we might expect: early risers (or perhaps late sleepers) searching for “coffee near me” very early in the morning, with “morning routine” spiking after three a.m. Some suggest more disastrous evenings—“urgent care” (A&E) spikes at four in the morning in the US, for instance.

Searches at night become gradually more existential as the evening wears on. As it gets later, loneliness starts to spike. We start searching for “How to fix…” or “How to calm down,” and, of course, “How to fall asleep.” These are our deepest fears, manifesting themselves when we’re on our own. Later in the book we will explore these concerns and how they impact so many of us.

One major area where we search for time is actually where we don’t experience any of it: sleep. Sleeping is more searched now than at any time in Google Trends history, and over that time it is more searched in the country of Azerbaijan than anywhere else on earth (the country is also apparently known for ferociously long weekend lie-ins). Sleeping connects with time because so many of the searches are about hours and minutes, specifically how many hours of sleep we need. Is it eight hours? Six? Four, even? We just don’t know.

I am very jealous of those searching for “12 hours of sleep.”

But really, we may search for hours of sleep because some of us just don’t get enough of it. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a third of adults and three-quarters of high-schoolers do not get enough sleep. Studies have shown that lack of sleep leads to poor health, and if you’re feeling lonely, you’re less likely to get good sleep. Loneliness can lead to poor sleep, which can lead to poor health.

We also want to know what happens when we are asleep. Search interest in dreams has spiked to all-time highs and we wanted to understand how humans search for them, how common different kinds of dreams are across the world, and how they have changed over time. We worked with data artist Federica Fragapane on “The Shape of Dreams,” a project to analyze thousands of dream searches to find the answers. Dreams might feel like something unique to each of us, but it turns out that we have a lot in common.

We conducted the analysis by looking for searches in seven languages related to three big questions—“What does it mean to dream about…,” “Why do I dream about…,” and “Meaning of dreaming…”—using data from over ten years, from 2009 to 2019. We deliberately excluded bad dreams first to avoid triggering anyone, and second because we didn’t need them.

We found that the biggest factor for differences in our dreams is actually language. Speak a different language, and our dreams will often be different—not all the time, but enough to be distinctive.

What do we dream about? According to our searches, it’s animals and insects, especially for English, Spanish, and Portuguese speakers, usually followed by family and relationships. The things we have in common are universal, and frankly slightly disturbing. First, there’s snakes, and in some languages those searches are very specific—“a snake biting you,” which shows up in English, or a “coral snake,” which shows up in Portuguese. There are also unique subjects that appeared only when exploring specific languages: dreaming about picking mushrooms appeared only in Russian, dreaming about camels in Arabic, dreaming about garlic in Portuguese, about iguanas in Spanish, and about a fox in English.

Another interesting feature of the way we search for time is how often we look for ways to make it go faster. This phenomenon is called “time perspectives.” Basically, we are either focused on the past, the present, or the future, in negative or positive ways, which means people see and feel the passing of time differently. Those focused on the future, for instance, tend to have increased optimism but can also feel both anxious about it and impatient with the present.

This variation in perspectives might also be why we seem to experience time passing differently in different places. In Mobile, Alabama, a small city with a population of under 200,000, “Why does time feel so slow?” is more searched than “Why does time feel so fast?” In New York, the city that famously never sleeps, it’s the opposite. (Although this could simply be due to the slower or faster pace of life in such places.)

Searches reflect how much we do wish our time away. “How many days…” is actually searched at a record high worldwide. Number one on this list spikes in late November every year and is only increasing: “How many days till Christmas?” We also want to know how many days until “my birthday,” how many days and seconds are in a year, and even “How long is a day on Mars?”

If you want to understand what relativity and time really mean, then search data is a good place to start. It shows how we search for our world from our own perspectives. They just happen to be perspectives we share without realizing it. “To those of us who believe in physics,” wrote Albert Einstein a few weeks before he died, “this separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, if a stubborn one.” His theory of relativity shaped the world we live in today, not only scientifically but culturally—a million movies and books launched on the theory of time travel.

The concept of time travel is more searched worldwide than the phrase “tell the time.” There’s a reason why “Is time travel possible?” is actually the top “Is…possible?” search. Of course, a lot of it is based on culture: “Is time travel possible?” reached an all-time high the same month the blockbuster movie Terminator Genisys reached peak viewing figures, in July 2015. But it’s a much more everyday search than we might imagine. Time travel is searched in every country on earth, and particularly highly in Asian countries such as Taiwan and the Philippines (although Taiwan in particular has seen a large number of time travel dramas in recent years).

Time is the very thing we often don’t have enough of; it limits us in what we can do each day. It is also a concept that creates possibilities we search for constantly. For me, it sums up how we search about the most ephemeral parts of our lives.

I don’t think that searching about time is a minor thing. In a world that can often seem imprecise and capricious, time itself can give us points of light, moments that provide certainty for our days. Rather than just being a standard search, searches for time are everything.

2

“How to ask politely”

Whenever I feel like I know nothing, it’s always centered on one thing: language.

Growing up in Britain in the 1970s, it was possible to drop the one language we studied at school: French. So I did. Our rural English comprehensive secondary school did not exactly teach us how to be model Europeans in 1979. We would descend on the French city of Boulogne-sur-Mer on day trips and stare in wonder at the bounty in the huge supermarché there while awkwardly asking for help so we could buy the (superior) French chocolate (with the wrong change).

Nowadays I can order a meal in a restaurant, say hello, and kind of make conversation in French. But I’m married to someone who speaks the language excellently, and my children learned two languages apart from English, so I am regularly outgunned in the communication department. And I am not alone in my uselessness in this respect: a study by the European Commission found that half of Europeans could not speak any foreign language well enough to hold a conversation. Language is hard.

It puts me at a disadvantage too. There’s quite a lot of research to show that we make better decisions in a second language, perhaps because they are less emotional and actually more rational.

While you might imagine searches for language would be steady and consistent, in fact they have risen since the start of Google Trends data in 2004 to an all-time high. Globally, we can see how languages compare in search. English dominates the list.

Chinese being so low was a surprise to me, although that doesn’t tell the whole story: Mandarin is the official language of China, and “Cantonese” reached an all-time high in search as I wrote this—and so did “Indigenous language.” In Sudan, the main language spoken is Arabic. “Sudanese” is not actually a language.

Language is in fact a persistent search. Half of the top “How to learn…” searches in the US are all about language. And that list is reflected in the top “How to say…in…” searches around languages too. In Spanish, they go on quite the journey, from “How to say hi in Spanish” and “How do you say I love you in Spanish?” all the way to “How do you say sorry in Spanish?” That’s a whole relationship, right there.

Top “How to learn…” searches

US, mid-2023–2024

1. Spanish

2. to read

3. a language

4. English

5. guitar

6. how to code

7. Japanese

8. French

9. AI

10. math

Searches for language can be seasonal as well: “ESL classes” (English as a second language) spikes in January and August, for instance. And you see similar activity around news events: “What does affirmative action mean?” spiked +1,000% reaching an all-time high the month in 2023 when the US Supreme Court ended affirmative action in schools and colleges. And “How to say…in Ukrainian” reached an all-time high after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

But how does the world search to translate words into English? Well, thanks to translation data, we actually do know a bit more about this. “Beautiful in English” is a project by Nadieh Bremer looking at the words most likely to be translated into English in different countries around the world. We examined the top translation queries in ten languages: German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Turkish. For six out of the ten languages we looked at, users were searching for translations of “positive” words: for three of the languages users wanted to know the translation for “good,” while the most often translated word across all languages is “beautiful.”

Translations for “you,” “hello,” and “thank you” into English are three of the most requested words in any language, which isn’t unexpected. But by focusing on the nouns and adjectives instead, we can get a glimpse into how different non-native English speakers use the language in their everyday lives. To get only the nouns and adjectives, each word was tagged with its grammatical form using the English translation (for Dutch, German, Italian, and Polish this was also done using the original word). The most translated words vary across languages, even sharing some surprising differences. Here are some of the breakdowns by different languages:

Top nouns and adjectives translated into English from each language, 2016

Rank

German

Spanish

Polish

Russian

Japanese

1

Beautiful

Beautiful

Thursday

Mama

Work

2

First name

Teacher

Tuesday

Thursday

Confirmation

3

Amount

English

Request

Russia

Decision

4

Vacation

Thursday

Little

House

Request

5

Bill

Wednesday

Order

Dinner

Japanese

6

Available

Place

Poland

Little

Document

7

Offer

Good

Wednesday

Quantity

Content

8

Decision

Love

Offer

Wednesday

Translation

9

Mrs.

Spanish

Name

Tuesday

Friend

10

People

School

Reply

Love

Japan

What about the common ground? For instance, Spanish shares four of its top ten translated words with both Portuguese and Italian, which makes sense given their linguistic similarities. Russian’s top ten, meanwhile, overlaps the most with Polish. In contrast, Japanese stands out as unique: none of its top ten translated words even appear in the overall top ten across all languages.

I love how it’s a mix of the mundane searches, such as days of the week or words such as “confirmation,” and the sweet, like “friend.” The data is from 2016, but there’s no reason to believe it would be substantially different today: globally we try to communicate love and beauty. And that’s good enough for me.

“How do you say tea in American?”

When we first moved to the United States, I was under the misapprehension that at least my lack of foreign languages wouldn’t be an obstacle to living and working in this new country. It would have been better to recall the aphorism that Britain and the US are “two countries divided by a common language.” It was first said by an Irishman, either George Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde, depending on who you believe. And that is without taking into account the one in five of the US population who speak a language other than English at home.

It is an aphorism because it has some truth in it. I had been writing professionally for over twenty years at that point, but found myself filing blog posts my editor was sending right back to me with bewildered comments. “You added a ‘u’!” And that’s not including the vocabulary variations, which can be significant, with different words used for the same object, such as “lift” (elevator) and “boot” (trunk). Even when it’s the same word, the pronunciation changes everything. Asking for a glass of water? English-English pronunciation would be war-ter, for instance. American English would sound more like wadder.

The top “How do you say…” query searched in the US about the UK? “How do you say cigarette in British?” But the top-searched one asked about the US in Britain is just perfect: “How do you say tea in American?”

So, we use searches for language to understand more about a place. “What language do they speak in…” searches have risen steadily, with Brazil and Switzerland the top two countries we search for in that way.

Top “What language do they speak in…” searches

US, mid-2023–2024

1. Brazil

2. Switzerland

3. Belgium

4. Iceland

5. India

6. Philippines

7. Netherlands

8. Singapore

9. Argentina

10. Greece

Some of the answers are simple, of course (Greece—it’s literally in the name). Others are much more complex. India, for instance, has twenty-two official languages and 121 languages with more than 10,000 speakers each.

The rise of sign language is also noticeable. Searches for the topic in the United States spiked to an all-time high fairly recently, in 2022, and the US is the top country worldwide searching for it, followed by Guatemala and Japan. According to the American Community Survey, the percentage of the population with a hearing disability has increased from around 3.5% to 3.7% since 2008. Over that time searches for sign language have increased by over 2,000%—so, searches for sign language have increased much faster than the proportion of the US population who are deaf has.

The searches are overwhelmingly supportive and kind. The top-searched “How to say…in sign language” is “you,” followed by “I love you.”

Top “How to say…in sign language” searches

US, 2019–2024

1. you

2. I love you

3. thank you

4. how are you

5. hi

In America, we can learn a lot by looking at the words we need help with when it comes to spelling. Can you guess which word was the top-trending “How to spell…” in California when this book was written? It was “pretty.” Thematically, you can actually group New York (“aesthetic”) and Texas (“physique”) with California, which suggests Texans have more in common than they might think with those coastal liberals in their interest in appearances. Some of the results are more obvious: in Delaware it’s “business,” which is probably related to the place’s status as a tax shelter. Then there’s just the weird: New Hampshire’s “tortured” and Wyoming’s “corduroy.”

Language searches also give us a real sense of place, showing a huge amount of variety, even for basic terms. For instance, states in the southern half of the US (as well as a couple in the northern half) search “curse word” over “swear word.” And southeastern states, with the exception of Florida, search “cake icing” over “cake frosting.” It applies to names too: Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma all search “katy” over “katie.”

At their root, our questions about language are about understanding—and knowing how to make ourselves understood. It’s also about comprehending what language is, in its very nature. We see searches for “What was the first language?” or “What is a metaphor?” for instance.

Original map analysis by Jenny Lee

For a plain-text version of this image, go to this page.

In Cyrano de Bergerac, written in the late nineteenth century by Edmond Rostand (or, if you grew up in the 1980s, like me, in the movie Roxanne starring Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah), the inarticulate character Christian relies on Cyrano to help him poetically profess his love for Roxane. Cyrano’s mastery of words allows him to create beauty and express profound emotions, even as his famously large nose limits his ability to directly woo Roxane. It seems that we are more likely to sympathize with Christian than Cyrano, turning to the internet to help us craft our responses to the world or even to understand what to say at all.

Charles Duhigg’s book Supercommunicators describes what sets powerful communicators apart. There are a number of rules he ascribes, one of which is to pay attention: “The most effective communicators pause before they speak and ask themselves: Why am I opening my mouth?” Trends data reflects this good advice, not least because while we might know what we want to say, we often don’t know how to say it. In fact, “How to say…” reached an all-time high recently, as did “How to understand…”

“How to ask a girl out,” for instance, is a consistently highly searched “How to…,” but when we look at “How to ask…” searches worldwide, they are often surprisingly mundane: “How to ask questions” is the top-searched “How to ask…” in the past five years. Sometimes it’s about important material issues: “How to ask for money” and “How to ask for a job” are both top ten. Then there are the questions that arise once you have a job: “How to ask for a raise,” “How to ask for feedback,” or “How to ask for a letter of recommendation.”

My favorite is “How to ask politely,” which is top-searched not in the UK (as I was brought up to expect) but in African countries like Namibia, Rwanda, Kenya, and Zambia. Polite Britain is actually ranked fortieth for this search, behind even the United States. Is it so ingrained in Brits to be polite that we don’t need to ask? I’d like to believe that was the case, but ten minutes with any reality TV show might convince me otherwise.

“How to say…” is also being searched at a record high since 2004, when Google Trends data began, as the world uses Google to work out how to translate from English into different languages. The top-searched “How to say…” is “How to say thank you.” This is not a selfish search but rather one that looks for a way to connect and communicate with others, as so many of the top trends do.

Top “How to communicate…” searches

Worldwide, all-time

1. effectively

2. better

3. with people

4. in a relationship

5. with spouse

One feature we look at a lot with Google Trends data is not only top-searched, but those terms that are trending in search—which really means the terms or topics that have grown the fastest over a period of time. Imagine a Formula One race: while the podium places are important, knowing which drivers overtook others during the race can also tell you something interesting. That’s what trending means.

One of the trending “How to say…” searches over the past five years that caught my eye was “How to say thank you for an unexpected gift.” It was so weird and specific that I began to look into when it started to spike meaningfully, increasing 1,300% in search. The growth appeared to have started in 2019 and come primarily from the African nation of Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world, hit hard by political instability, violence, and drought. It was a pretty niche query, insignificant compared to searches for the weather or football, for instance. But there were a number of questions here. One of the first that came to mind was that Niger is a former French colony, so why would this English search spike there? For example, the top related search for “thank you” in Niger is “thank you en français.” Was it English speakers, perhaps aid workers, visiting Niger, receiving a gift unexpectedly and then wanting to recognize it?

You would think that gift-giving would not be top of the agenda for a country that has been through so much that the U.S. Department of State advises visitors not to travel there due to “risk of crime, civil unrest, terrorism, and kidnapping.” That sent me on a journey, but emails to the Nigerien embassy in Washington, DC, and the US cultural center in the capital, Niamey, went unanswered, and online research led nowhere. In the end, the answer came from an unexpected source. Dr. Fadji Maina is a scientist working at the cutting edge of hydrological research for NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. She is also happy to talk about her home country, Niger.

“Nigeriens deeply value sharing whatever they have with those who visit,” she says. When visiting someone, such a gift could be a chicken from the farm, or eggs if the chicken is too much to give, or milk from a cow. “It is unthinkable to show up at someone’s home empty-handed or to leave without something in return. Sharing is simply part of who we are.”

And this is reflected in search data from the country. In a continent where gift-giving is a way of life, Niger was one of the top places in Africa searching for “cadeau” (or gift) in the twelve months before I wrote this book.

“Middle-class families often keep small items at home in case unexpected guests arrive,” Dr. Maina told me, “guided by the saying: ‘Whoever shows up, you should be ready to give them something.’ After living abroad for years, I am amazed by how my friends and family, despite having so little, always find a way to offer gifts. For us, giving is a way to honor others and create bonds of mutual respect.”

So there we are: a search for how to say something in a language we don’t understand reveals a cultural truth rooted in everyday experience.

“Very demure, very mindful”

Language changes so fast, we struggle to keep up sometimes. Google Trends data can help us do that. Words that didn’t exist just a few months ago become part of our everyday lexicon—even as we change how we communicate with each other. For instance, “What does brat mean?” reached an all-time high the month after British artist Charli XCX released her album Brat in 2024.

One way we can see those words emerging and changing is to look at searches for “Definition of…” The top “definition” search in 2024 was for an old word, “demure,” which came from a viral trend that seems ancient already: “very demure, very mindful,” coined by TikToker Jools Lebron in a video about workplace etiquette.

Top “definition” searches

Worldwide, 2024

1. demure

2. smh (“shaking my head”)

3. gaslighting

4. niche

5. pansexual

“Gaslighting” is another example of a word that seems to have traveled by time machine. The 1944 film Gaslight is the origin, a psychological thriller set in Victorian London about a husband who tries to convince his wife that things she thinks are untrue are the opposite (and the protagonist mucking around with the gas lighting in the house). Some time in early 2017, the word started trending in search as if transported to a divided world. So a film set in the 1870s and released toward the end of the Second World War created a word that resonated in the mid-2010s and shows up significantly in search data to this day.

With changes in language comes increasing uncertainty, and a fear that still exists of saying the wrong thing. In fact, searches for “Is it OK to say…” have never been higher. The top-trending “Is it OK to say…” searches in the past half decade are led by “Is it OK to say happy Juneteenth?” and “Is it OK to say Chinese New Year?”

We can also get insights into the latest slang as we struggle to understand what our children and grandchildren are saying. As I write this book, the top-searched slang definition is “skibidi,” which will seem ancient by the time you read this and can mean at least three contradictory things: cool, bad, or dumb. Only four years ago it was searches for “simp” (short for “simpleton”). Last year it was “fie” (disgust/disapproval), and the year before that it was “rizz” (charisma).

We looked at the growth of slang searches over history, and each word offers a snapshot of a moment in time. It’s such a moving target that we really need to focus on one of those moments. Let’s take 2018 as our example. We examined the top related searches for definition, define, and dictionary, such as “selfie definition” or “define selfie.” We excluded proper nouns and acronyms and then ranked words by growth throughout the year. In 2018, these ten words led the pack: incel (involuntary celibate), uwu (happiness/kindness), mukbang (livestream video of the host eating), ibf (internet best friend), zaddy (attractive, stylish man), blockchain, rng (random number generator), jit (young person), gekyume (higher plane), and woke.

“Woke” came from nowhere and went on to become one of the most popular definitions on Google, with its search interest peaking in early 2018. None of 2018’s top rising definitions has achieved the pervasive popularity of “woke.” But comparing helps with context: “mukbang,” for example, was about half as popular as “woke” was at its peak early in this year. It had re-emerged after a New Yorker article by Kathryn Schulz that rediscovered the “lost giant” of American literature William Melvin Kelley, who coined the word “woke.” His work was subsequently republished in late 2018, since when the word has also become overtly political.

“Incel” and “uwu” also surpassed “nonbinary,” one of 2017’s top words. These changes happen quickly. “Blockchain,” for instance, went from a word no one searched for to a prominent term across America.

It’s not just new words, we also have new acronyms to contend with, a side effect of messaging that has permeated every aspect of our everyday lives. In 2024, the acronym that hit an all-time high in search was LWKY (it stands for “low key,” by the way). Only the year before it was BFFR (be f*cking for real). Take a look at the list below of acronyms that reached an all-time high in each of these years and you’ll get a picture of a society that is ever-changing:

Acronyms that reached all-time highs

US, since 2009

2009: FML (f*ck my life)

2010: FTW (for the win / f*ck the world)

2011: SMH (shake my head)

2012: YOLO (you only live once)

2013: OOTD (outfit of the day)

2014: THOT (that ho over there)

2015: TBH (to be honest)

2016: WYD (what’re you doing)

2017: TFW (that feel when)

2018: LOL (laugh out loud)

2019: FOMO (fear of missing out)

2020: FYP (for you page)

2021: 1437 (I love you forever)

2022: IYKYK (if you know, you know)

2023: BFFR (be f*cking for real)

2024: LWKY (low key)

Do changing searches also show acceptance of the way we use language in different places? Pronouns (they/he/she, etc.) are searched now more than ever before in the US. And while it may not be a surprise that liberal Vermont is the top state searching now for pronouns, just a few years ago it was South Dakota. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, Gen Z and Millennials are significantly more comfortable with gender-neutral pronouns than older generations. We can’t tell demographics from Google Trends but one thing that changes over time is tolerance, and search data often shows searches for social change moving from “anti” to “informational”—wanting to know what something means rather than wanting to know why it is wrong or right.

Social media and messaging apps have changed another aspect of how we talk to each other: we now use shorter, more informal communication styles, including emojis and emoticons. And even that is changing. In May 2013, search interest for “emoji” surpassed that of “emoticon” for the first time (and it’s remained higher ever since). They are searched more than anywhere else in South East Asia—South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. And in the US, “Japanese emoticons” is one of the top search terms related to them.

Emojis and emoticons are different: an emoji is a small picture , while an emoticon is a sequence of keyboard characters :). For many, the two terms have become interchangeable and “emoji” has become the term of choice over time.

At one level, it seems obvious that emojis represent a universal language, one we all understand—a modern-day equivalent to Douglas Adams’s Babel fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. If you haven’t read it yet (you should), in short, a Babel fish is a kind of universal translator—you simply pop it in your ear and it allows you to instantly understand anything said to you in any language. Search performs much the same function. (And, yes, there is a Babel fish emoji in Slack: .) If you trust Adams on this, the ability to communicate universally doesn’t necessarily result in greater goodwill and understanding between peoples: “Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”

Adams’s dry warning notwithstanding, there is an emotional rawness and vulnerability to talking to each other with emojis that we all understand. There’s a reason why “love you emoji” is one of the fastest-accelerating searches around emojis in recent history. According to a 2021 paper by researchers at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, when we communicate with emojis online, it seems more real: “Compared to messages without emojis, those including emojis were perceived as emotionally more intense.” In an age when communication is increasingly not face to face, emojis can replicate the feelings we used to receive from looking a friend in the eye—the power of nonverbal communication.

Search data also shows how they’ve become more nuanced and sophisticated over time. One example is this, which has spiked in search recently: . You might think it’s a fencer, but it’s used to express disapproval, often along with the wordsBACKBACK I SAY. One of my colleagues explains it this way: “It’s like ‘stay away from me’ but in a joking way.”

If it feels like the way we are speaking has changed fast, it’s because it has, not least with the development of “algospeak,” a way of communicating that was developed to evade social media platform content moderation that started spiking in search in 2022. Basically, to avoid getting their comments removed from posts on sensitive topics, users developed a way of communicating that moderation systems wouldn’t pick up. It’s howBACKBACK I SAYbecame popular, as well as,” which mimics a trending video sound of someone banging their credit card on a table because they want to buy something ASAP.

Emoji searches are certainly changing. Now we see trending searches for “devious emoji,” for example, or “buck teeth emoji.” But these are funny, nuanced, and often heartfelt. It may feel like a language of its own, but the meaning is still clear: we want to express something positive, happy even.

And the top-searched emoji? This one:

3

“How to boil an egg”

My grandma loved to cook. Everyone in the family has a particular dish of hers they loved and can remember; for me, it was the wartime recipes she picked up in the 1940s and made because we asked for them every time we went to stay. Grandma’s kipper pâté, eggless chocolate cake, and chocolate mousse (made with hazelnut spread) still give me pangs just thinking about them.

She certainly took it seriously: she had graduated from a Cordon Bleu cooking class and made meals that seemed impossibly exotic in 1970s Britain. We had fresh baked cheesecake and baked Alaska on family trips to their apartment, and their utility cupboard was always full of fermenting Greek-style yogurt.

It’s not really the food, of course. The taste of her huge spreads is all mixed up with the smell of our grandparents’ tiny kitchen and memories of eating around their gigantic dining table. Food is not just fuel. It’s a way of remembering who we are and where we come from.

Food is also one of the few topics in search that comes anywhere close to being as highly searched as the weather. It is a constant, one we search regularly—because we want to, as much as have to.

When we look at the top-searched questions asked on Google, we don’t have to go too far down the list to see a theme emerging. There’s a hint with “How many ounces in a cup?” and “How many ounces in a pound?”…and then it’s right there: “How to make pancakes?”

I love making pancakes—the thin Dutch kind. Especially with cheese and mushrooms melted in, or chocolate spread with strawberry jam. I like making them for my children, especially when they have friends over. It’s the easiest recipe in the world too: cup of flour, cup of milk, two eggs. And it makes me happy how happy it makes them to scarf them.

Pancakes are the kind of recipe where there’s a different version in pretty much every country on earth. From French to Indian cuisine, there’s something with flour, eggs, and milk or water with a local flavor, which is why it’s a universal search.

Perhaps because searches for food are not something we share publicly, many of them are surprisingly honest, and about instructions we often feel we should have absorbed by now. Is it the case that we are embarrassed by not knowing where to start in the kitchen? Or is it that we feel we should know?

American chef and food writer Julia Child in her book My Life in France said: “No one is born a great cook, one learns by doing.” It might be more accurate now to say that we need to be reminded of even the basics on a regular basis.

“How to boil an egg” is consistently one of the top-searched “How to…” questions about food worldwide. It is searched everywhere from Jamaica to Australia and seems to be something we’re not sure of, with search volume high enough to suggest it must be people asking the same question repeatedly. And “How long to hard boil eggs?” and “…soft boil eggs?” are searches that have risen steadily over time. Interestingly, they are searched enough to have become topics in their own right in Google search. Hard-boiled wins out though, being searched twice as much as its softer counterpart. (My daughter would always ask for a “softy” egg, so that trend doesn’t reflect me as much. I like them runny and with toast.)

And it’s not just eggs. There are plenty of staple foods we need to know how to make a start with. Rice, potatoes, salmon—all of them have seen top searches around how to cook and where to begin.

It’s the same for what we understand about food. We may feel that guidelines about what you can and cannot eat are constantly changing—although in the US, for instance, official dietary guidelines only change every five years or so, depending on evidence. It can get confusing, and we can see that in the way people search about food itself.

When we look at the top “Is…” searches around food of all time, they split into two camps: what something is (“Is tomato a fruit?,” for instance) and how unhealthy something is.

Take searches for gluten, the proteins found in everyday ingredients such as wheat, rye, and barley. They have never been as high across the world in search as they are right now. Gluten is even more searched than saturated fats. Is it because of awareness of celiac disease, which is triggered by gluten? Well, searches for gluten have rocketed in recent years while searches for celiac disease have stayed pretty steady, which suggests that awareness about gluten may be more to do with changing diets than anything else. “What is gluten?” is actually the top-searched “What…” question about food of all time. The breakout trends (those accelerating fastest) around gluten are all about how to eat less of it: “gluten free near me,” for instance, or even “gluten free doughnuts.”

One thing that has changed over time is the rise in access to substitutes that are close to the food we really want in the first place but are trying to be healthier about. The top-searched food substitutes are all for foods like cream and oil, butter, and eggs.

It seems we literally want to have our cake and eat it too when it comes to the foods we love. “What time does McDonald’s stop serving breakfast?” is a top “What time does…” search in both the UK and the US. Some things are universal, and a love of fast food is widespread. The top country searching for it of all time? Iran. Followed by the US. Maybe the two countries have more in common than they might guess. Although Iran, cut off from the West, has seen a rise in “bootleg” fast food, with restaurants with names like “Mash Donald’s,” “Sheak Shack,” and “Pizza Hat” becoming popular with young people there.

The top “Where…” searches around food give us an insight into how we think about what we eat, even when it comes to flavorings we use every day. Vanilla is probably the world’s most valuable spice shipped around the globe, and “Where does vanilla flavoring come from?” is a breakout search, which means it increased more than 5,000% since Google Trends data began. That actually tracks with concerns over how sustainable producing vanilla is, and a concurrent rise in alternatives or worldwide farming projects to make it more environmentally friendly and fairer for farmers in places such as Madagascar, which produces 50% of the world’s vanilla.

Another trend that speaks to how food searches have changed over time, and reflects the increasingly global marketplace we live in, is searches for pineapples, such as “Where do pineapples grow?” When I was a child, you never saw a real pineapple in a grocer’s or supermarket in England. The first time I ever came face to face with a genuine one was in Guyana, in South America, when visiting my wife’s family. Before then I had no idea how to cut one or even where to begin eating it. (A great tip from my mother-in-law: rubbing salt into the skinned pineapple before you cut it makes it sweeter.) In the 1970s, pineapples came in tins by Del Monte, in rings or segments, and were served with cubes of cheddar on toothpicks at parties. This was a recurring joke in the 1977 play Abigail’s Party by Mike Leigh, with hostess Beverley pressing the exotic treat on one of her guests, Tony—“A little cheesy pineapple one, Tone?” Nowadays, globalization and the growth of what is now a $40 billion industry means we can buy a proper, tasty pineapple in virtually any supermarket when they’re in season. Which is probably why the top places searching for where they come from are the UK, Ireland, and the US.

In both the UK and the US the top-trending pineapple recipe in the past few years is actually for a cocktail: a porn star martini with pineapple juice. This cocktail usually comes with passion fruit juice, another formerly exotic fruit that has spiked to record highs in search as it becomes more everyday and normal.

“How to cook for beginners”

If you take Julia Child at her word, we can all learn to cook, whether we know it or not.

Searches for cookbooks spike in December—in fact every December as long as Google Trends has existed, and in every country around the world where people give gifts in the same month. Does that mean we buy them as gifts at Christmas, rather than use them to plan meals?

Perhaps, but the research also suggests that both Americans and Brits are increasingly cooking at home. In a 2023 report by a food industry body, researchers claimed the increased cost of living and a desire for healthier meals were bolstered by food influencers on social media helping people plan meals and discover new recipes. There was, they said, a shift toward home cooking, health-conscious choices, and the strategic use of frozen and refrigerated foods in the American food landscape. The same trend was reported in the UK, similarly inspired by the rising cost of food in 2022 and 2023.

So, what do search trends say? The picture is a little less clear. Searches for recipes worldwide have stayed remarkably flat over time, only spiking dramatically in, you guessed it, 2020, at the height of the COVID pandemic. They also reach their peak in December every year, even in the US where you might imagine Thanksgiving (in November) would cause those high points instead.

What has increased over time in the US is searches for “How to cook…,” which are three times higher than they were in 2004. They have grown almost parallel to “do it yourself” searches. So it appears that there is something going on here. In an age when recipes and meals are online, in print and on TV—surrounding us—we can all be chefs in our own kitchen.

The top “How to make…” food searches of all time are a pleasant mixture of basics (rice, bread, cookies, and pizza) and slightly more complex and interesting ingredients: chocolate, butter, and ice cream. Google Trends gives us a sense of who we are cooking for as well, recognizing that different people have different needs.

I love that “How to cook for your dog” is right up there with “How to cook for kids,” although possibly for different reasons. Perhaps we are just getting more choosy about how we select food, both for our family and for our pets. Certainly searches for “How to pick a good…” reached an all-time high in 2024, speaking to a desire to find good-quality ingredients. For example, I am pretty good at picking great avocados. Admittedly we live in California, which, in my opinion, produces the best Hass avocados in the world when they’re in season. But that is the only piece of produce I am good at choosing.

Once we have the ingredients, what do we do with them? We looked at the top “What to make with…” searches, and it looks to me as if we are often searching for interesting things to do with everyday ingredients (“recipes to make when bored” has seen a spike in search since 2020, when it was at its highest). Many of these are ingredients you might have at home already, so maybe a lot of cooking is deciding at the last minute what to make. We know that searches for “How to cook…” tend to spike in the afternoons, when the idea of dinner starts to loom over many families, and people are looking in their fridges and working out what will be easiest to make.

It’s perhaps why “easiest recipes” are searched more often than “healthy recipes.” However much we want to create our own feasts for those we love, in the end we also want our lives to be easier and simpler. And sometimes the two just don’t match.

“Who invented peanut butter?”

One thing we know about the way we search is that, while we are all unique, people often do the same things at the same time online. It’s a running theme of this book: what makes us unique is also what makes us part of a community. In this case, a gastro-community.

And a lot of this is intricately connected with health.

Some of it is predictable. In January, we are more likely to search for “healthy recipes,” healthy foods like quinoa, “How many calories in…,” and “How to diet.”

When we get around to the end of the year, food takes on a dominant drumbeat as holidays come thick and fast: Thanksgiving in the US, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa…This stream comes with a thick menu of dishes that start popping up in search. In the US, Thanksgiving comes with a deluge of search interest in how to cook turkeys and a spike in “mac and cheese.” In December, it’s searches for panettone and “How to make cookies.” Quite a lot of this activity is also about alcohol.

Some I have almost no explanation for. Take “Who invented peanut butter?,” which is the top “Who…” search around food and spikes every February. (Incidentally, the first patent for peanut butter was filed by John Harvey Kellogg, of cereal fame.) “How to make espresso” spikes every December, which could be related to hangovers or it could reflect the massive rise in sales of coffee machines in recent years.

We see food trends related to international events too. “Chocolate muffins” reached an all-time high during the 2024 Paris Olympics, after the athlete village treats were made famous by Norwegian swimmer Henrik Christiansen. And in 2022, when the first season of the TV show The Bear aired, the top-trending “spaghetti recipe” was “the bear spaghetti recipe.”

There is a clock to the year in food searches. And it says a lot more about our emotional state at different times—craving comfort food in October, or traditional dishes in December. Sometimes we need to search just to remind ourselves of how we felt. Maybe food is as much about memory as it is about eating.

“How to cook quinoa”

Our tastes have shifted dramatically since Google Trends began in 2004 and I wondered if we could see that contrast in Google Trends data.

Take the journey that kale has been on. Brassica oleracea has been around for thousands of years, but it wasn’t until fairly recently that it became a favorite of foodies, available in fine restaurants, and a staple for families across the world. As vegetable expert Adam Alexander wrote: “I cannot think of another vegetable whose image has been so transformed in recent times.”

And we can see this in search. Kale is now searched over seven times as much as it was in 2004, and still sees spikes in searches for different salads. As I write this, the top-trending kale searches are for salads that sound amazing: “kale white bean salad” and “kale crunch salad.” What’s most interesting is if you look at the chart, it clearly spikes between about 2013 and its peak in 2019, before settling into a constant pattern. This “new” food went from relatively unknown and relatively flat search interest to a staple in the life of the internet.

Looking at searches for all food over twenty years allows us to see how the decades compare. What is up, and what is down? What do two decades of fads, new ingredients, and more actually look like?

Where we once searched for “How to cook chicken” or “How to cook a ham,” the top searches now are for how to cook quinoa or lobster tail. “Almond milk” searches surpassed “soy milk” searches in January 2012 and have been higher ever since, while “oat milk” surpassed “soy milk” in May 2019. When we look at searches for recipes, the difference is even more stark. In 2004, the top-searched recipes were low carb recipes, chicken, and “crock pot”; now they are for banana bread, meatloaf, and chocolate chip cookies. This seems like both a shift to comfort food as well as to more sophisticated recipes. Humans are full of contradictions, and those are on full display when we look at how we search to eat.

Food is such a huge reflection of culture and heritage that it is natural there should be variations around the world. And when we take the top-searched cuisines globally, you can see the influence of tourism and immigration on how we eat.

Mexican, Italian, and Chinese are the top cuisines searched with restaurant in the US; worldwide, the top cuisines searched with restaurant are Italian, Chinese, and Indian.

Because we can also see which types of cuisine are increasing in search the fastest—those trending dishes—we can also get a sense of how diets are changing. Since 2004, Chinese food, which is also the top-searched type of cuisine, has dominated the list, but we’ve also seen the rise of Thai and Korean cuisine around the world too.

Top-trending cuisines in search since 2004

Worldwide

- Chinese

- Korean

- Thai

- Japanese

- Italian

- French

- Indian

And when you map those foods, you get a fascinating look at how they have spread across the globe. In the US, Chinese food is king. In Russia, it is Korean. In Brazil, Japanese is the top-searched, and in North Africa it is Italian. We are all globalists when it comes to food, it turns out.

Those variations reflect countries’ different histories. Thailand, Korea, and Laos are the only global regions searching pork over beef and chicken, while Taiwan, Mongolia, Macao, China, and Hong Kong are the only global regions searching beef more than chicken and pork. And while tacos are considered a traditional Mexican dish, the United States searches “taco” more than Mexico does. Incidentally, “How to fold a burrito” is more searched than “How to fold pants” (though in January 2019, when Tidying Up with Marie Kondo aired on Netflix, “How to fold pants” was searched over twice as much).

And those idiosyncrasies continue: California, Nevada, and Hawaii are the only states searching “Is…vegan?” over “Is…gluten free?” while Hawaii is the only state searching pork over beef. Neighboring states Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, as well as Georgia and the Carolinas, and (not neighboring) Illinois and Maine, search salad over soup.

One of the biggest areas where geography makes a difference is in takeaway (or, in the US, takeout) food. A way to find those searches is to look for the words “near me,” which have become a routine part of such searches since the 2010s. We search “near me” around food all the time and it gives us a good sense of variations across geography. We’ve seen a massive spike in searches for “takeaway near me”—the highest peak was in 2020 during COVID but it’s still more highly searched now than it was before.

So, when we get a takeaway, what are we eating? It depends where you live. In England, for example, you’re most likely to search for Indian food, while in Paris the top-searched food is—wait for it—pizza. And “pizza near me,” “sushi near me,” “ice cream near me,” and “doughnuts near me” are the top specific food “near me” searches in the US.

We see that variety within a country too. For most of the US, searches for “Chinese food near me” are higher than for “Mexican food near me.” But not in the western states, such as California and Arizona. There, “Mexican food near me” reigns supreme.

Restaurant searches, which dipped precipitously during COVID, are actually at an all-time high in search now, worldwide. And searches for the Michelin Guide to restaurants reached a twelve-year high worldwide in 2024. In the US, searches for them spike in July each year, when eating outside is at its best. In fact, globally, “buffet” is over twice more searched than “fast food,” although in the US “buffet” is only 37% more searched (and yes, the top-searched restaurants nationally in the US are McDonald’s and Domino’s pizza). And that’s despite the fame of buffets in many US cities. One thing you might not know is that Paradise, Nevada, a twenty-minute drive from Las Vegas, is the top city in the world searching for buffet.

Restaurant searches are changing too. We looked at the top-trending searches around them in the US in the past five years to see how they had shifted. “Restaurants with heated outdoor seating” searches had increased, suggesting that those eating-outside habits that started during the pandemic have continued. If anything, we’ve become fussier about how we eat out: searches for “restaurants with a view,” “restaurants with outdoor seating,” and “restaurants with live music” have all spiked since 2004. And there’s at least one search I wasn’t expecting: “restaurants with igloos near me,” which has apparently become a thing in San Francisco and other cities (meaning clear plastic tents erected around people’s outdoor tables at fancy restaurants).

“How to diet”

It is a search that spikes every January, like clockwork. However, the search for “diet” is lower now than at any time in Google Trends history. Is it possible that our attitudes to diets are shifting?

Certainly we are looking for different kinds of food now. For the first decade of Google Trends (from 2004 through 2013), “low fat” food/drink searches were nearly ten times that of “low sugar” food/drink searches, but in the last ten years “low fat” food/drink is not even twice as searched as “low sugar.” In April 2011, for the first time, “low calorie” food/drink searches overtook “low fat” food/drink searches. The two remained similar for the next couple of years, but in December 2013, “low calorie” food surpassed “low fat” food/drink for good.

Top-searched diets, 2024

Top-searched diets, 2004

South Beach

Mediterranean

Atkins

Carnivore

The Zone

Keto

Low Carb

Anti-inflammatory

Cabbage Soup

Brat

Mediterranean

FODMAP

Grapefruit

Dash

Macrobiotic

Paleo

3-day diet

GOLO

Mayo Clinic

Military

The Atkins diet has slipped off in search over time, since its high point back in 2004, superseded now by searches for the Mediterranean diet, though that still has not reached the Atkins peak.

But some trends are less short-lived. Both vegetarianism and veganism have trended upward in search data and stayed steady as they become more common globally. The top countries searching for vegetarianism now are Taiwan and Germany, both nations with traditionally meat-heavy diets, which is almost a societal shift. “Plant-based” has also trended upward, and “veggie burger near me” has increased over 5,000% worldwide since 2004.

Meanwhile, searches for “organic food” are lower now than they were in 2004, despite reaching a peak during COVID—and that is also despite record sales for organic food. That could be a side effect of something we see in search when a term gets more common over time: we search for something often because we don’t know what it is; when we do know what it is, we search for it less. Maybe now we all know what organic food is and there isn’t much left to ask about.

“Food donation near me”

Even in the wealthiest countries on earth, many people struggle with access to a sufficient diet. The top places on earth searching for “food bank” are also countries where food is most plentiful. Searches for “food bank” have seen a steady increase since 2004, with a huge spike in 2020 during COVID.

But that’s not the only recent peak: in 2023, when post-pandemic inflation was at its highest in both the UK and the US, searches for “food bank” were again way above average. We can see this too with searches for food stamps (the US Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), which saw a huge spike in 2020 and stayed high as food inflation hit.

Sometimes it’s about giving back when you have enough. The US is also the top country searching for “food donation near me,” and searches for volunteering at food banks spike every Thanksgiving.

Searches for food banks and food assistance are predictive of a wider economic issue. Food prices get higher, wages don’t keep up, and we see a rise in searches. And while these searches happen in real time, official statistics are often delayed, which means Google Trends spikes often occur before something is picked up. This is another example of Hal Varian’s Trends “nowcasting.”

For those who have the least, food carries a significance and power that others might miss. Refugees, for example, often use food to remind them of the homes they were forced to leave. The Between Meals cookbook, published by San Francisco Bay–area not-for-profit Refugee and Immigrant Transitions, pulls together recipes from a few of the 1,400 refugees who settle in the area each year. There’s malawah (a sweet flatbread from Somalia), kaw swep yo (coconut chicken soup from Karen State in Burma), and goat curry from Bhutan. Wherever people go, they take their cuisine with them, and you can see this in Google Trends data. Ukrainian food spiked in search in 2022 in Poland, Canada, Ireland, and the UK after refugees from the Russian invasion arrived there. Somalian cuisine is most searched in the countries where Somali refugees settled—Djibouti, Kenya, and Uganda.

Trends data also lets us see changes in diet sometimes before we even know they are about to happen. What will be the next foods we are obsessed with? Google Trends data can give us some idea, although by the time you read this, it will seem either completely prescient or just a snapshot of an interesting moment in time.

Food searches that reached an all-time high in 2024

US

- “candy salad”

- “cottage cheese flatbread”

- “cotton candy burrito”

- “fluffy yogurt”

- “ice cream pancakes”

- “mango gummies”

- “mushroom chocolate”

- “pickle margarita”

- “pistachio chocolate”

Food, it turns out, is the ultimate trend: our searches change constantly and enthusiasm shifts for different ingredients with every turn of the earth around the sun. Diets may be a constant in search, but they ebb and flow as much as our tastes do.

4

“Why is my poo green?”

The plane was about to take off when I realized something was wrong. My left eye was filled with thousands of floating spots against the bright sun of Las Vegas, and when I closed it I could see flashes of light. All my instincts told me to just ignore it, and I nearly did. But all the medical knowledge I could find online told me to get to an emergency room as fast as I could. This was a retinal tear—treatable if I got to see a doctor ASAP, potentially blinding if not.

In case you’re wondering, I went to the hospital that night and got laser surgery at 2:30 a.m.

Because search data is so unfailingly honest, we can see how we collectively care about something that is incredibly personal: the health and well-being of ourselves and those around us. At the same time, Google Trends data gives us a way to explore what we want to know, without revealing the personal. It’s a unique, anonymous collection of how we search in the moment when we want to know how we are.

It is important to note that searches are not illnesses. There has been some research into whether health searches could preemptively highlight the rise of different conditions globally, and for a few years Google ran a project called Flu Trends to see whether that data would be useful to health services. But search data does not substitute for health statistics or detailed scientific studies.

This is not a chapter about the results we get when we search. It is, however, about what we look for.

Health is what we call a persistent search. In fact, one in every twenty Google searches is for health-related information. If you look at the top-searched questions of all time, health shows up often enough that we can see how significant it is. Searches around the world like “How to lower blood pressure,” “How many calories in a banana?,” and “How to make a baby” are consistently among the most searched questions on all of Google.

If you have watched TV, or a film, or just read any article in the last few years, you may already have a picture of health searches as the bane of doctors’ lives, that someone searching about a health condition or a healthy diet or a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic is somehow a negative thing. I am not a doctor, obviously. But I see health searches as a sign that we want to have some control over our lives, to understand something that is happening to us, or even how to help someone else who is going through something. Health searches aren’t “bad,” per se; they are part of life. Not every website has accurate information and you should always make sure the information you’re acting on is correct, of course, but health searches do tell us a lot about who we are. And they are not just about medical conditions, they’re about what we eat, how we exercise, and how we feel in ourselves. And, as we saw in the introduction, this book is not about search results, it is about what we are looking for, and how that has changed.

The Google Trends data spans the life-changing, the much more specific (“Why is my poo green?”), and the sort of things we search for in the middle of the night, such as back pain, diarrhea, or insomnia.

What the list shows me is how everyday a lot of these searches are—“How to treat a burn,” for instance, where treatment is pretty straightforward for nonserious injuries. These are often health queries we can manage ourselves. Some are more complex: “How to get pregnant” is an example, and “How to stop snoring” is similar. Lots of different answers apply to each. But either way, we just need a bit of guidance.

Top-searched “Is/Are…” about health

Worldwide, all-time

1. pneumonia contagious?

2. bronchitis contagious?

3. shingles contagious?

4. strep throat contagious?

5. sinus infections contagious?

Health is associated with so many searches we make, even down to our food: searches for “Is…healthy?” are at an all-time high. Let’s take poo. (Really.) Searches for feces are higher now than at any time in Google Trends history. “Green stool” (often caused by a diet high in leafy green vegetables) has been searched so often it has become a topic in Google Trends data, which means it shows up in different languages and different countries. The top places on earth searching for green stools are Jamaica, the Philippines, and the United States. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “traveler’s diarrhea” is actually one of the most common illnesses tourists to Jamaica suffer from, which may explain part of the spike, although it doesn’t explain other countries. But it does represent a typical health search: something unusual happens and we want to find out more. Perhaps it’s a bit embarrassing, something we might want to understand a little better before going to see a professional, and maybe we don’t wish to post our intimate details on social media.

What comes across in healthcare searches is how often they show that our bodies are mysteries to us and we often don’t know where to start.

Top “How…” searches about health

US, all-time

1. to lower blood pressure

2. to get rid of hiccups

3. long does COVID last?

4. many calories should I eat a day?

5. many calories in a banana?

Health is a serious enough issue that an international study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) includes health literacy—understanding your health—as a major skill alongside language, technology, and learning in its annual report of adults across developed nations. Lacking those skills can have adverse effects. Across the fifteen countries in the survey, nearly half (44%) said they would find it difficult to judge the “advantages and disadvantages of different treatment options.” In addition, 42% indicated that they would find it difficult or very difficult to decide how to protect themselves from illness using information from the mass media, and nearly the same number (38%) said the same about mental health.

So a lack of information, or understanding how to deal with an issue, can have real effects on health and happiness. We can see that in some of those health searches that take place at night (after midnight and before seven a.m.): sadness, back pain, diarrhea, insomnia, breastfeeding, crying, pregnancy, pain, alcohol, death. As we learned in the opening chapter, nighttime is when our darkest thoughts come out, and often they revolve around health.

Health searches are seasonal too. “Is…bad for you?” spikes every January (as does “Is…good for you?”). “Sunscreen” spikes every June, and reached an all-time high in 2024. “What does a tick look like?” spikes every May/June. In the US in October, “Medicare” spikes (coinciding with the open enrollment period), as does “influenza vaccine.” And every January, as gym searches spike, so do food health searches: “detox,” “healthy recipes,” “How many calories in…,” and “How to diet.” The calendar of health searches is reliable, for sure. And while this is something we understand already for, say, flu or the common cold, it actually applies to a number of conditions.

Working with data artist Gabriel Gianordoli, we looked at twelve years of health-related searches. This was prior to COVID, which gives a sense of how we search typically, rather than during a health crisis. In the twelve preceding years, the most common health searches globally were “pain” and “cancer,” with “diabetes” most commonly coming in third, occasionally replaced by “acne.” Gabriel was able to amalgamate all twelve years of data so that each health search could be seen averaging month to month. Some of what his work shows is to be expected: searches related to flu, bronchitis, and a cold are significantly more common during the winter. Axios, reporting on the research, noted that “after New Year’s Day, searches for chest pain are the most popular, plausibly due to increased food and alcohol consumption related to the holidays, which could cause heart problems.” Summer peaks were dehydration, skin rashes, and candidiasis (a fungal infection—possibly caused by wet bathing suits?). And during the spring, allergy-related searches were most common—as well as chickenpox, since spring is the peak season for the disease.

But other seasonal searches have different explanations. For instance, we see that breast self-examination and mammography spike every October, which is also when breast cancer awareness month takes place.

Some conditions cause one-off spikes: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)—or motor neurone disease (MND)—peaked in search in 2014 during the summer when the ice bucket challenge was popular.

That seasonality applies to what we can do to make ourselves healthier, including diet and exercise. In fact, the gym industry bases its revenue expectations on the norm that more of us will sign up in January, after the excesses of the holiday period. Recent Januarys have seen higher search interest than ever before in “gym,” with even the December low points in search at all-time highs. So while the industry is concerned about slightly declining memberships, searches show no sign of going down.

If you had to guess the top place searching for the gym over the last few years, I would bet good money that you might not pick Nicaragua. But according to Google Trends data, Nicaragua is the top country searching for the gym, followed by Cuba, Mexico, and the UK. Before 2013, searches for “gym” in Nicaragua barely showed up at all. Nowadays, you do not have to look far to find social media content on going to the gym in the country, for tourists and residents, despite political and social upheaval. It’s an example of where Google Trends can show us a fascinating glimpse of life in another country, even one graded as “not free” by Freedom House.

Sometimes these searches are driven by big events—for instance, the 2024 Olympics saw spikes for “adult gymnastics” and “adult tumbling classes.” Some are new Google Trends or exercises that didn’t exist before. For instance, “dead butt” (technically known as “gluteal amnesia”) is now more searched worldwide, with “dead butt exercises” reaching an all-time high in 2024, perhaps as an effect of a sedentary lifestyle.

Right now, plastic surgery is the top-searched type of surgery, over eight times more searched than cardiac surgery, for instance (despite heart disease being the top cause of death in the US). It is also highest-searched in South Korea, where plastic surgery is extremely popular. But there are changes going on globally in search too: breast reduction searches are growing closer to breast augmentation searches, for instance, and since February 2024, knee replacement searches have been higher than rhinoplasty (nose job) searches.

There are other discernible changes. The top three trending “What causes…” searches, those that have accelerated the fastest, are about conditions specific to women: “What causes a UTI in women?,” “What causes lower abdominal pain in females?,” and “What causes migraines in females?” The top-searched queries of all time are different, and more gender-neutral:

Run clubs have reached record highs in search around the world. This isn’t just about the exercise, however: a recent study found that running in groups can be effective as an antidepressant and helpful in treating depression and anxiety.

Sometimes it is simply about stopping doing something that you know is bad for your health. Search interest in “How to quit vaping” surpassed “How to quit drinking” in 2021 and has remained higher ever since, while “How to quit smoking” and “How to quit vaping” have been neck and neck since September 2023.

Exercise and diet questions are inextricably linked, and we often search for both in the same session. As we know from the previous chapter, in January 2012, for the first time, “low calorie” food/drink searches overtook “low fat” food/drink searches. The two remained similar for the next couple of years, but in December 2013, “low calorie” food surpassed “low fat” food/drink for good. There are geographical patterns to this: in the US, the top five states searching “weight loss” were all in the South: Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, Louisiana, and West Virginia.

We certainly worry about what we are putting into our bodies. The data shows that “Is…bad for you?” has reached an all-time high, as has “Is…good for you?” And “milk” and “coffee” are among the top five searched in both categories—just to show you how confused we are about this.

Top “Does…” searches around health

US, 2024

1. matcha have caffeine?

2. magnesium help you sleep?

3. chai tea have caffeine?

4. rice have gluten?

5. chai have caffeine?

By their very nature, search queries are often niche and, well, weird (at least to those who aren’t searching the same thing). But, as I hope we’ve already established in this book, we are all just that little bit weird and unique.

Perhaps if we really want to understand how we search for health, what we need is data from a once-in-a-lifetime health event, one that affected millions. And, of course, we have one at hand: the coronavirus pandemic (COVID).

You can find more on COVID and how it affected us in chapter 9. But understanding how we searched about the virus, and how those searches evolved over time, can tell us something bigger about how we regard search in our daily lives.

We worked with the data team at Schema to explore this phenomenon. The resulting visual exploration used Google Trends to look at the top COVID-19-related search queries in the months from January to March 2020, as the virus was spreading and hitting its heights around the world. That’s a lot of data, so we focused on queries that began with the questions “How to…” or “What is/are…” The data was filtered so it only included queries about COVID, its worldwide outbreak, and its effects. That left us with over 23,000 queries in the US, and over 8,300 from around the world.

So, what did the numbers tell us? In the US, there was an evolution in search queries. In January 2020, as the first cases started to be reported, we saw a rise in the phrase “What is…”—queries such as “What is coronavirus?,” “What are the symptoms of coronavirus?,” and “What is a pandemic?” But as the seriousness of the epidemic dawned, something shifted: we searched for “how”—queries such as “How to prepare for coronavirus,” “How to make a face mask with fabric,” and “How to get tested for COVID.”

For me, this shows that, first, we want to know what’s happening, and whether we need to worry about it. Once we’re engaged, we assume we can do something about it and we want to know how. And COVID was unusual, a health crisis that kept our attention rather than rising and falling as others had in the past.

At its core, this is very simple: first, information; second, action.

Then, as lockdowns were imposed, they began to dominate search—“How to file for unemployment,” for instance, began to rise. And, as official statistics always lag behind real-world events (and how we search for them), these searches started to happen before unemployment began rising officially. April 2020 had the highest unemployment rate in the US since 2004 of 14.8%. It also saw a peak in search interest in unemployment, at its highest ever—but zoom in and unemployment searches started spiking weeks before they showed up in the official figures. Some time between March 8 and 15, searches for unemployment began to spike. We did not have official unemployment figures until the beginning of April.

We also wanted to see if what was happening in one country was happening in another too. Would they follow the same pattern of information to action? It was simplest to compare English-language queries, so we focused on six countries: Australia, Britain, Canada, India, Singapore, and the US. Regardless of geography, the patterns were the same: searches about the economy, such as questions about unemployment and furlough, appeared at later dates and often followed an interest in general knowledge about the coronavirus. So, as the virus spread, we saw people around the world searching in similar ways.

Top “Can COVID…” searches in 2020

US

1. live on surfaces?

2. live on clothes?

3. live on food?

4. live on fabric?

5. live on paper?

COVID changed everything. We wanted to see how long it took for searches to return to normal, so we worked with Schema again to look at search data around shopping trends before, during, and after the pandemic. What we found was that while some products spiked in search during COVID but then settled down again (think searches for “bleach,” “masks,” and “toilet rolls”), others not only spiked but stayed high after we were getting back to normal—“dog supplies,” “alcohol,” “roller skates,” “vinyl LPs.”

Big events such as this affect more than just economies or how we buy toilet paper. They affect us in places where we store our deepest emotions. And they don’t disappear from search data, even when they become history rather than current affairs. Search interest in COVID-19 has been higher than that of the common cold and influenza since March 2020.

And the effects of COVID haven’t just been felt on our physical health. One study found that 38% more people are being treated for mental health issues after compared to before the pandemic.

This is visible in the Google Trends data, in part in a rise in searches around sleeping and not being able to. And it’s not all about having a partner who snores (although “anti snoring” is searched at an all-time high now). We ask “Does…help you sleep?” more than ever before. And there has been a rise in searches for products to help people sleep: “sleep gummies” and “white noise for sleep” are searched more than they used to be. It shows changing Google Trends too: in December 2022, “magnesium for sleep” surpassed both “CBD for sleep” and “melatonin for sleep.”

For sure, some of this is seasonal—“How to fall asleep” spikes every August and January—but some of it tracks with increasing rates of anxiety around the world.

It is a universal phenomenon. In the UK, anxiety rates increased significantly after COVID, to about a third of both women and men. In 2022/2023, an average of 37.1% of women and 29.9% of men reported high levels of anxiety—a big increase from previous datasets. And it’s the same in the US, where a recent study by the American Psychiatric Association found Americans feeling increasingly anxious. When they asked people what they thought was impacting their mental health, the top factors they cited were stress and sleep.

Worldwide searches for both stress and anxiety have never been as high as they are right now. That increase actually started before COVID, but the virus appears to have boosted its growth.

However, the top place on earth searching for anxiety has nothing to do with the pandemic. Strikingly, it is Ukraine. And those searches coincide exactly with the Russian invasion of 2022 and the huge impact that had on the civilian population.

The questions we ask around anxiety show that combination of a desire to help and to find out more about the condition. This one stuck out for me: “What does anxiety feel like?” Google Trends data shows again and again how we try to put ourselves in others’ shoes, particularly when it comes to health. “How to support someone with depression” is the top-searched “How to support…” In both the US and the UK, the top-searched “How to help…” is “How to help someone with depression,” and that has been true for the last decade. When we see someone struggling, we want to help and we want to know where best to begin.

It’s a recognition that we understand how lonely it can be to have any kind of health condition. Whether or not the person you know asks for help, it doesn’t appear to stop us wanting to do the right thing.

“Why do my eyes hurt?”

On Monday, April 8, 2024, a swath of eastern states in the US plus parts of Mexico and Canada were treated to a rare occurrence: a total solar eclipse, along a narrow path from Texas to Maine.

One of the first lessons you learn at school about a solar eclipse is to wear special glasses and avoid looking into the sun directly. Searches following the eclipse suggest that for some people, that advice did not get through. Breakout searches included “my eyes hurt after eclipse” and “Why do my eyes hurt?” And those searches even followed the path of the eclipse itself:

So, no matter how much good advice we get about our bodies, we don’t always follow it. All search can do is give us the tools. It’s up to us if we use them.

5

“Why does my dog eat grass?”

We first met Biscuit in November 2018. He was supposed to be with us for two days, as an eight-week-old foster puppy who had worms—something disgusting enough to put everyone in the family off asking actually to keep the dog. Of course the reality was very different: a ball of fluff who took indifference as a personal challenge. We became what the pros at San Francisco Animal Care & Control call a “foster fail”—a family whose promise to keep an eight-week-old Maltipoo only for a weekend crumbled when faced with the furry reality.

Biscuit, eight months old. Photo: Simon Rogers

Within weeks, the whole house began to operate around Biscuit. And in return he provided unconditional love for everyone, whether or not they were actually members of the family. He’s curled up next to me as I write this and has managed to squeeze himself into the smallest possible space between me and the edge of the couch. In our brief time together, we have seen weird habits, scary illnesses, an adoption, and a large otherworldly tick (Biscuit is a magnet for ticks). If you were curious in the health chapter, this tick was reddish brown, had six legs, and wouldn’t let go of his tail. All of this was new to us, and all of it required help and advice from the world about what to do.

Searches for pets are surprisingly constant, actually a flat line for as long as Google Trends has existed—something we don’t see that often in search data. When you compare searches for pets to other common searches, say, going to the gym, or dating—well, searches for dating dipped in 2023 (a story for a later chapter), and searches for exercise spiked during the COVID pandemic in 2020. Searches for pets? They stayed pretty much the same.

Now, there are some exceptions, of which more in a moment, but interest in pets is a global constant too, whatever is happening to us. Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom are the top countries searching “pet” worldwide, in any language. It’s an exception that becomes less of one when you understand that dogs are the number one searched pet worldwide, more than cats or fish (which are less searched than keeping a horse as a pet). And the search data matches real life too: in the US, nearly half (45.5%) of the country’s households own a dog, followed by cats at 32.1%. That is nearly ninety million dogs in one country alone.

“But,” you’re going to say, “didn’t everyone adopt dogs during COVID?” Yes, it’s true, the spike for dogs during COVID was noticeable and above the average searches for pets, and it doubled in search interest from 2004 to 2022. There was a worldwide spike of more than 5,000% in pet adoptions during COVID, when “Should I get a dog?” reached an all-time high in June 2020. COVID even affected pet searches more broadly too: “Can dogs get COVID?” was the top-trending dog search, and “Can cats get COVID?” was the top-trending cat search, meaning each accelerated more than other searches.

Search interest in “dog adoption” has been higher than “dog breeders” since April 2012. Foster care for any kind of animal reached an all-time high worldwide in April 2020, and “How to foster a dog” became a breakout search in March 2020. Adoption-related searches have returned to their prepandemic level now but pets are still searched highly across the world, with Australia and the US the number one countries. And, yes, dog adoptions are searched more than for any other animal.

People who don’t have a dog still search for them, such is the depth of affection for humans’ best friend. “Should I get a dog?” is searched over twice as much as “Should I have kids?,” for instance. In the US, the exception is South Dakota, which is the only state searching “Should I have kids?” more than “Should I get a dog?” (although only just).

So, if the great pets debate is about cats versus dogs, then the war has already been won—a canine victory across the world. Well, almost. Dogs are more searched for than cats in the US, UK, all of Europe, and South America, but cats are top-searched in Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia.

In Russia, cats are preferred to dogs as pets, which may reflect how important they are in Russian literature, with writers like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov often using them to play a symbolic part in the narrative. It’s not always straightforward though. In Tunisia, for instance, where more people own dogs than cats, cat searches are ahead—which could just mean that cat owners are more active searchers. Although, interestingly, a cat can be considered a more “pure” animal than a dog in Islamic tradition.

The strong links between dogs and humans have been a source of a lot of research into how they became domesticated in the first place. One group of scientists in Russia experimented with captive foxes. Over time, they “self-domesticated,” becoming comfortable with humans, and in turn adept at picking up on their social cues. Scientists at the University of Lincoln wanted to know if dogs recognize human emotions and feelings. They showed dogs pictures of humans looking happy and sad and measured their response, finding that when dogs see a happy human, they respond to it. I’ve also seen Biscuit comfort a crying child many times; he just knows to do it. So, search can reflect how we think that dogs can help us too: searches for “service animal” reached an all-time high in 2024 and the term has increased year after year since March 2020. The same is true for “emotional support animal,” searched at a record high worldwide in 2024 too, with the US, Canada, and the UK at the top of the list for these comforting companions.

“Do penguins have knees?”

What comes through in the data again and again is how much of a mystery animals are to us. Often searches are basic questions of the “Why does my cat/dog…” variety, where we want to know why our dog eats grass or why our cat drools when we pet it.

But a lot of animal searches are actually less about pets and more about wanting to understand the world around us a little better. Some of these are great questions: “Do fish sleep?” (kinda), “Do penguins have knees?” (yes), and “Do dogs have belly buttons?” (also yes).

We simply want to understand why they do what they do. “Why do dogs…” and “Why do cats…” are each searched over four times more than “Why do kids…” “Why do dogs lick?,” “Why do cats purr?,” and “Why do dogs eat grass?” are among the top five “Why do…” searches. “Do dogs dream?” is the top “Do dogs…” of all time. Sometimes our searches are more complex, even agonizing, like “How to keep a weak newborn puppy alive.”

Cat and dog searches take up enough search interest that we worked with data scientist Nadieh Bremer on the most complete project to catalog dog vs cat searches ever produced anywhere. A lot of it is pretty weird.

The idea was simple: how do we search for cats or dogs? But we needed it to be more focused than that. “I felt that asking for the question popularity of anything relating to cats and dogs would be too broad,” wrote Nadieh. “However, constraining the questions to include only those that would start with ‘Why does/are/is my/a cat/dog…’ seemed like it would provide a dataset to dig into. To show the reader what questions are most popular—‘Why does a cat purr?’ or ‘Why do dogs lick?’ maybe? But also to reveal the more specific questions—‘Why does a cat purr when I pet her?’ for example. To show the nuances, but also to see if some general odd behavior is asked by many people, and thus appears to be ‘normal’ behavior for cats or dogs.”

Biscuit has what I think is a strange habit: before eating his food he dances around it, as if he’s trying to bury it (I’m guessing here—I can’t ask him). It’s common enough that search results give me a number of options, including anxiety, an “aversion to bowl sounds,” or just the simplest: because he’s always done it. What if the whole world has pets that do similarly odd things? That’s what this project ended up exploring, with over 4,400 different questions asked about cats and dogs.

Starting with dogs, we wanted to know what the data would look like if we looked at questions that start with the following words: why does a dog / why do dogs / why is a dog / why are dogs / why does my dog / why is my dog. A lot of the data concerns things that look like this: But the biggest set of queries we ask are about what they lick. Unsurprisingly, many of the questions are about why dogs lick us, especially our legs and feet. But there’s more: we also ask why dogs like licking things that just seem unlikely, such as metal, windows, blankets, pillows, cushions, beds, carpets, and furniture.

In general, any dog owner will tell you that one of the biggest mysteries is why dogs eat just about anything, although it’s good to remember that all canines are descended from scavengers. Nadieh found that, after licking, questions about what they eat was the biggest group of topics. Specifically, eating-related questions are dominated by why dogs like to eat lots of unsavory things, from poo to charcoal. Why dogs eat grass and poo are the top two things we search for.

Some more things we learned:

We want to know why dogs sit on other creatures (mainly humans) and why they roll over when they’re in trouble.

“Why do dogs howl at the moon?” is one of the top questions asked about howling.

While we want to know why our dog is barking at the postman, we also want to know why it is barking at “nothing at all.”

For cats, biting is a lot more popular in search than what they eat, while for dogs it’s the other way around. As Nadieh says, “The questions people ask about cats are surprisingly similar to dogs and yet totally unique. A lot less licking and poop, but instead much more sleeping, biting, and cucumbers!” The internet consensus is that cucumbers look like snakes, triggering some long-dormant fight-or-flight response in felines.

Whatever the truth, the data shows that cats are particularly weird. People who search for why their cat poos in the litter box but pees on the floor may want to exchange tips with those who want to know why their cat pees in the litter box but poos on the floor. We want to know why cats have rough tongues while dogs have smooth ones, and why our cat makes weird noises at birds, and stares eerily at your face while you sleep.

The owners who want to know why their cats eat fake Christmas trees are the ones I feel for. Cats attacking Christmas trees is actually a trend, with numerous YouTube videos and Reddit threads about how to cat-proof your tree, fake or real fir.

Is it possible we underestimate how hard it can be to keep a pet? The questions we ask would suggest that at least we want to get it right, especially around food for dogs, which dominates pet searches.

There’s a reason why “How to calm a dog” spikes in the US every Fourth of July when fireworks are lit across America—mostly we just want to do the right thing. In another sign of how challenging this can be, “animal hospital near me” searches spike between five a.m. and seven a.m.

We see this during natural disasters too, when it might be assumed that self-preservation is the priority. In September 2024, Hurricane Helene made landfall, the deadliest storm to hit America since Katrina in 2005, killing more than 200 people. As this happened, the affected states all saw spikes in searches related to keeping pets safe—“pet-friendly hurricane shelters near me” in Florida and “how to calm a puppy down” in Georgia, for example.

“Can you have a panda as a pet?”

When you ask search “Can you have…as a pet?” and those three dots stand for an animal that will grow to over twice your size, then we probably already know what the answer is, and that it’s likely to be complex, involved, and probably not practical (or legal). We already know that dogs and cats dominate pet searches overall, but what about slightly more unusual animals? Like a panda, for instance? Despite the fact that pandas are a protected species, would be very hard to get ahold of, and pretty difficult to keep in the average apartment, searches for “Can you have a panda as a pet?” are surprisingly common. (No, no, you cannot.)

As you can see in the list below, it’s not even the most searched pet on the list of animals, with the choice of a monkey as a pet seeming positively conventional compared to keeping an otter, or a raccoon, or even a squirrel. It shouldn’t be overlooked that many “exotic pets” are on endangered lists, they make terrible pets, and they are transported in barbaric conditions by smugglers across the globe. I suspect the searches for whether it’s possible to keep an animal as a pet have more to do with curiosity than action. While for Russia it’s “wolf,” which is an animal that actually exists in the country, in Swaziland the top-searched animal is a raccoon, not native to Africa. Similarly, searches for pandas as pets seem to be highest in countries where they literally do not exist (except online perhaps): São Tomé and Príncipe, French Polynesia, and Somalia, for instance.

In the US we also ask “Do raccoons make good pets?,” and in the UK you’re more likely to search for the perhaps more sensible bearded dragon. But if we want to see which animals are actually being searched in increasing numbers, then the list of trending pets can give us some idea. If we look at the US, for instance, in the year before this book was published there was accelerated search interest for animals such as the ball python—the most commonly traded African species under CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species), with more than three million of these reptiles exported since 1975, mainly from Togo, Ghana, and Benin—followed by border collies and iguanas.

“How long does a hamster live?”

Pluto is a tortoise. To be more specific, he is our tortoise, although really we are his humans, given the feeding, soaking, and heating we do for him. He was about ten years old when we first got him as a consolation for not getting a puppy (see the beginning of this chapter for how well that went). Now he is strikingly vigorous and healthy and will almost definitely outlive us: Golden Greek tortoises can survive for well over a hundred years. It’s a real commitment to own a tortoise.

One of the top searches around pets globally is about just that: “How long does a cat live?” is universally highly searched, followed by chickens, horses, and hamsters. Some of these are also specific to breeds, “How long does a betta fish live?” being one example. With pets, lifespan is always the question nagging at the back of our minds. We only get to borrow them for a little while.

Our responsibility for their well-being means we want to know everything. And those searches inevitably end in sometimes crushing loss, with some of the top searches centering on grief after the loss of a pet. Pet owners often talk of their pets saving them. Writer V. S. Naipaul was so upset by the death of his cat Augustus that he told Vanity Fair afterward, “He knew me. Therefore he cannot be replaced.” That level of kinship can be hard to understand, unless it happens to you.

Surprisingly, the devastation following the death of a pet means that some of the top searches around grief of all kinds actually focus on the loss of an animal and companion. When you look at the top “Do…” searches related to grief in the US, they include items such as “Do dogs cry?,” “Do dogs/cats grieve?,” and the slightly mystical “Do dogs know when another dog dies?”

There is actually some research to back up the idea that animals show grief-like behaviors. One study by researchers at Michigan’s Oakland University found that cats exhibited grief after the death of a feline or canine housemate. That behavior included changes in “eating habits, playing less, and increased clinginess.”

Either way, we see it in the queries that show up in Google Trends. Searches for how to cope with grief over the loss of a pet, such as “dream of dog who passed away” or “How long does dog grief last?,” provide glimpses into the heartbreak of a lost pet.

For so many of the searches around pets, what comes across is the almost mystical qualities we place on the animals that live with us. We want to know if they understand us, if they know things about us, if the mutual affection is real. Searches such as “Does my dog know I’m pregnant?,” for instance.

But mostly it just comes down to one thing, the same common feature of so many searches in this book: love. It’s why there are consistently high numbers for searches such as “Does my dog love me?” or “Does my cat love me?”

Maybe we’re just needy and we want to know (and I am as guilty of this as anyone), or maybe it’s just part of the mystery. We may never understand, but it won’t stop us asking, “Does my dog know how much I love them?”

6

“How does gravity work?”

When my then nine-year-old daughter asked me what was bigger, the universe or the galaxy, I searched for the answer. Obviously, I should already have known it. I’ve edited a newspaper’s science section and a book on science. But I wanted to check (it’s the universe, by the way), and search allows you to be honest about that: if I hadn’t just confessed, you wouldn’t have known about it, or had the option to mock me about it (as I deserve).

If the way we search is about anything, it is the need to understand the world better. And also the need not to feel, or look, publicly ignorant. There are no dumb questions in search. It doesn’t matter what we don’t know, it’s an entirely nonjudgmental environment for getting stuff you don’t understand explained to you, whether it’s for your homework or just because you’re curious.

In a way, of course, this chapter is cheating. Scientific concepts can be complicated, by their very nature, and need explanation. And if you’re not studying some of them in college, maybe you don’t actually need them in your everyday life. You don’t need to understand how a toaster works to use it, for instance. (But if you’re like me, using something when you understand it is just much more satisfying.)

That certainly doesn’t stop us asking questions. We want to understand what science is. “What is the scientific method?” and “What is a hypothesis?” have both risen consistently over time and are often the top-trending scientific searches.

For their part, I can tell you, after my time working with them, that scientists are often obsessed with how to communicate their research effectively to the public, perhaps as a result of seeing good studies disappear into obscurity. The entire science industry is based on publicity: the more times a study is cited, or reported in the media, the more likely its author is to get funding. So it’s in their interests for us to understand what they are talking about.

And it’s in our interests to understand what they are talking about too. Across the OECD countries, only three in ten young people have a baseline understanding of key skills, including science, by the age of fifteen. And those the OECD defines as “socioeconomically disadvantaged young people” are “25 percentage points less likely to reach baseline levels of proficiency in science than their more advantaged peers.” So an understanding of science, at a basic level, can impact your prospects in life.

At the same time as this realization has become apparent, searches for science are actually pretty flat, down very slightly since 2004 (with a slight rise post-COVID in 2022), though still a major topic in search. In Germany, the UK, France, and Spain, science is searched less now than it was in 2004. Now, it may be that instead of searching for science more broadly, we’re now looking for specific topics such as DNA or vaccines or 2D materials in ways that don’t register in search in the way they used to. But there’s another possibility: are we starting to take scientific advancement for granted?

Science applies to our everyday lives so much that we often don’t realize we are asking about it when we are asking about it. And that is what this chapter is really about: the moments when science intersects with our daily routine (hint: it’s all the time). It’s why searches in the US for “How does…work?” have massively increased since Google Trends began, and are now at their highest point in history. “How does the sun work?” is a breakout search, meaning it’s increased over 5,000% since 2004. And the same is true of “How does electricity work?” and “How does gravity work?”

That nonjudgmental environment I mentioned earlier is also why the data is sometimes comical (if lewdly so). Searches for “What is the scientific name for the world’s largest cockroach?” have spiked nearly 5,000% since 2004. The answer to the question is also the answer to why it was a top-trending search: Megaloblatta longipennis. It can grow up to 3.8 inches long (the cockroach, not the other thing you’re thinking of right now), and it went viral due to its…interesting name. It was one of the fastest-growing “scientific name” searches for 2024.

“What is a star?”

When you look at the top-searched questions on all of Google, science queries are in there often because something has happened to make it so. Take questions such as “What is a solar eclipse?” and “What is the speed of sound in mph?” These spikes seem to me to be based in actual events, in that we search for them when they happen to us—when a fighter jet passes overhead, or here in San Francisco when once a year the navy flies multiple air displays over the city during Fleet Week.

But often we look for the fundamentals as a way to understand the basics. You may not know, for instance, that oxygen and hydrogen are the top-searched chemical elements, but their importance in our survival at least explains why they are so highly searched.

Sometimes it helps to look at what’s accelerating in search the fastest, to see how things have changed. For instance, two-dimensional space is the top-trending topic related to science, worldwide, which means it has accelerated in search more than any other term. That may be because 2D materials are increasingly of interest to scientists. These are unimaginably thin materials, perhaps one or two atoms across, such as graphene, a form of ultra-strong carbon discovered at the University of Manchester in 2004.

We also want to understand those concepts that have been known about for longer, and know who was behind the big discoveries that shape our lives. Take the top “Who discovered…” searches below, which are about establishing facts we perhaps feel we should know. That sense that the world is changing fast and I, for one, don’t want to be left behind.

This is really about comprehending our universe. We ask what is the sun and the moon, “What is the solar system?,” “What is a planet?,” and “What is a star?” alongside “What time is sunset?” We can see this too when we look at the top “Why…” searches around chemistry, some of which might be homework questions (“Why do covalent bonds form?,” for example), while others feel more basic, like an effort to comprehend something more fundamental: “Why do atoms bond?” The top “What…” searches for chemistry reveal a similar story.

Our desire to understand how things work is essentially evolutionary psychology: learning about our world can increase our ability to survive. Being afraid of snakes because we might get bitten is a prime example of healthy learning behavior (although for many of us in the UK that cannot be a daily occurrence, so is it some instinct buried in our brains from our distant past?). It is about understanding our immediate environment. Our brains evolved to prioritize information that aids survival; it’s deeply rooted in our biology. Maybe it feels like a stretch to say that searching “How many electrons does carbon have?” is about evolutionary survival, but I would argue, as the OECD study mentioned earlier suggests, that it’s more important than we know.

Many of these searches seem to be about giving us a basic grounding in topics we may have forgotten from school or feel that we should know. Some are deceptively complicated, like “Where are electrons located?,” and sometimes we’re obviously trying to shortcut just looking things up: “Where are metals on the periodic table?”

Europe actually searches more for science than any other continent, and we wanted to understand what those searches look like. So we explored nineteen years’ worth of search data around more than 120 scientific topics across Europe, dividing them into breakthroughs and the more everyday subjects, covering 2004 through to 2024. The team focused on astronomy, biological sciences, chemistry, earth sciences, mathematics, and physics to select the topics, chosen due to their high level of search interest on the continent. We wanted to get at those scientific breakthroughs—the most significant discoveries over the last twenty-five years—but also the everyday topics that we see showing up in search.

The results provide a fascinating glimpse into how a whole continent cares about science. The top European country searching for science over that period was Poland, followed by Portugal. The UK was at number five. Within that grouping, Russia was the top country searching for math and computing. Belarus was in top place searching for astronomy, while Norway was top for earth sciences. It seems that science resonates in different ways in different countries.

The list below represents the big moments that resonated for a whole continent. The top searches on black holes happened after the discovery of the most distant black hole seen in X-rays, using NASA telescopes. Global warming has been growing in salience in search as far back as Google Trends goes (with “climate crisis” becoming an increasingly popular search term). Number three centers on the events of December 2022, when scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California achieved “ignition,” a major breakthrough in nuclear fusion that meant they got more energy out of the reaction than they put in. The James Webb space telescope, which is now the biggest telescope in space, reached its destination in 2022, when it spiked in search. And monoclonal (lab-produced) antibodies spiked in search due to their role in the development of COVID vaccines.

“Why is the sky blue?”

“How does it work?”—it’s one of our most everyday searches and is actually searched more now than ever before in Google history. We also want to know how medications work, how a blood test works, how a credit card works, and how social media works. These are the searches that shape our lives and our understanding of stuff that seems to change all the time.

That curiosity applies to everything around us. “Why is the sky blue?” is the top “Why is…” search on all of Google, for example. This is a different kind of science search, it seems to me, from “How steel is made,” which is one of the other top science questions. Admittedly, the science behind why the sky is blue is pretty interesting—it’s down to the “Rayleigh scattering” of light or other electromagnetic radiation by tiny particles, which is what happens when light, like sunlight, hits the particles and gases in the air in the atmosphere. Beyond that, searching for why the sky is blue has an emotional value: blue skies are associated with calmness and tranquility, they represent optimism and hope. One of my oldest friends, who you’ll hear about later in this book, loved the Electric Light Orchestra’s “Mr. Blue Sky,” and that song will always remind me of him. So, when the sun is out and the sunglasses are on, sometimes I can hear Jeff Lynne singing.

The other top “Why…” and “Do…” questions about science are so common they show up consistently around the world, in different languages. We encounter them so often that at some point, it seems, we have to ask, “Why is the ocean salty?” and “Do bedbug bites itch?”

I love these searches, not least because I have asked some of them myself. Something that seems simple, with a simple answer when you need it. Insects seem to dominate this field of everyday searches. When we look at the top “Is/Are…” searches around science, it shows how mysterious the natural world is to us. “Are spiders insects?” (no). “Are daddy longlegs spiders?” (no). “Is Pluto a planet again?” (not really, it’s a dwarf planet, which is not the same thing).

Then there are “How…” searches, which are different because they are about taking action. We often ask “how” with science because we want to know how to do something. It could be how to get rid of fruit flies or bedbugs, or even “how to find the area of a circle.”

Many science searches put human beings into perspective. Douglas Adams described it best in the opening lines of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” It’s a theme expanded on by Carl Sagan in Pale Blue Dot, his call for us to understand our place in the universe, recognize how fragile our planet is, and celebrate our scientific achievements. Pale Blue Dot was published in 1994, but the concerns Sagan raised are still salient today. For instance, sustainability-related searches reached all-time highs in 2024, as did terms such as “eco anxiety” and “greenhouse gas emissions.”

A lot of our searches, “When…” ones in particular, are in pursuit of that sense of place. We want to understand where we fit in the scheme of things—our “cosmic insignificance,” as philosopher Guy Kahane puts it. We want to know “When is the next full moon?” and “When did dinosaurs go extinct?” We ask “How many billion years ago did the Big Bang occur?,” and “How long ago did the earth form?,” even if the answer to the latter (4.5 billion years) is unimaginable to us.

Top “When…” searches about astronomy

US, all-time

1. is the solar eclipse?

2. is full moon?

3. is the next eclipse?

4. is the lunar eclipse?

5. is new moon?

We seem to just really like looking up at the moon.

Many searches are time-specific: we ask them because something has just happened and we want to know what it is and, crucially, why it is. This is us using search to explain things that happen around us. For example, in the US, “carpenter bee” spikes every May, and “firefly” every June—it actually reached an all-time high recently. “Pink moon meaning” spikes every April, and “Perseids” every August. Our searches are as seasonal and topical as our world is. And there are lots of examples. For instance:

- “What was that loud boom just now?” reached an all-time high in New York in July 2024 after a small meteor entered the atmosphere above the city, making a loud noise

- “How hot is lava?” spiked +1,000%, reaching an all-time high during the May 2018 lower Puna eruption in Hawaii

- global search interest in Pele’s hair reached an all-time high during the 2022 Mauna Loa eruption (this is actually about the thin strands of glass formed when volcanoes spit out molten lava, not the Brazilian footballer’s coiffure)

- search interest in “discovery” reached an all-time high in February 2017 when NASA scientists announced the discovery of seven potentially habitable exoplanets; “habitable zone” also reached an all-time high

On May 10, 2024, a series of powerful solar storms took place, the most potent since the 1980s. The biggest impact for humans on earth was that from Florida to Hawaii, Cyprus to India, and Brazil to New Zealand we could see the northern and southern lights, or aurora borealis and aurora australis (if you’re in the southern hemisphere). There was a corresponding spike in search to put that natural phenomenon at the most searched it has ever been.

This is a real-life example of how something wonderful happens and we want to mark the moment and understand it better. And then post a pic to social media.

The second way we think about our place in the universe is through location. It is perhaps why we ask how gravity works, because we live on a planet with enough mass to create a gravitational pull to keep us from floating up into the clouds. We want to get a sense of where things are, even if the distances alone are much bigger than we can ever conceive. “Where is the sun?” or “Where is the moon?” are examples, the two top-searched “Where…” questions about the universe. Yet they are also close enough—we know what they look like and can see them every day. There’s also my favorite question: “Where are we?” The answer Google’s AI overview will give you is: “We are currently located on Planet Earth, which orbits within the Milky Way Galaxy, in a solar system centered around the Sun.”

I think the answer we are seeking may actually be a bit more complex than that, certainly if you believe Guy Kahane’s theory of cosmic insignificance. “What is most striking about the immensity that surrounds us,” he writes, “is that it is very nearly empty.” We want to know why the moon turned red across western America in 2021, when forest fires changed the color of the sky. We want to know why the earth orbits the sun—actually the fourth top-searched “Why…” question about astronomy of all time. We want to know why we are not the center of the universe.

“Is Star Wars science fiction?”

It’s long been known that science fiction and actual science have a close relationship. Science fiction movies have inspired teens who went on to become famous scientists. And we have certainly seen a rise in searches for “science fiction” in the past five years, although it’s also possible that is not how we search for science fiction anymore. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, for instance, deals with a number of complex scientific concepts but is searched three times more than science fiction as a genre. If you’re interested, the top-trending query about the MCU is which order to watch the movies in (chronologically, natch).

Some time ago, when I worked for the Guardian, we asked scientists to choose their favorite sci-fi movies. No one refused to get involved, and all had strong opinions. The winner was Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, based on Philip K. Dick’s short story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. A bounty hunter tracks down fugitive androids using an empathy test. “The Voight-Kampff empathy test is not far away from the sort of thing that cognitive neuroscientists are actually doing today,” said one neuroscience expert.

And we can see how science in movies actually impacts search data through real examples in recent years. Here’s just one four-year period:

- October 2014, Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan: “wormhole” searches spike to an all-time high; there were also spikes for “gravitational time dilation” and “theory of relativity”

- December 2017, Ready Player One trailer released: “virtual reality” searches spike to an all-time high

- April 2018, Avengers: Infinity War is released: searches for “multiverse” reach their highest point in history

Is it possible that science fiction influences our searches more than actual science? Unquestionably that is true. Maybe when we care about something, we have an urge to understand it better.

And when reality and sci-fi seem to collide, it inspires us to know how we can be part of it. “How to become an astronaut” reached an all-time high in May 2020, when the first crewed orbital spaceflight since the final Space Shuttle mission in 2011 launched from the United States.

Part of our interest in science fiction is surely that it often reflects a future where previously unimaginable things seem possible. There, we can go to Mars or travel in time. There’s a reason why “Is it possible to fly?” is the top non-pregnancy-related “Is it possible…” search.

Searches reflect our dreams too. And there’s nothing fictional about that.

7

“What does love feel like?”

There are two identical twin sisters who have never met and live in different continents. Their parents split up, each taking one baby, and moved abroad before their daughters ever got a chance to know each other. By an extraordinary coincidence, as teens they meet at a summer camp and plot to reunite their parents, swapping identities to make it happen. Eventually, by another extraordinary set of coincidences, the parents realize they are still in love with each other and are reunited. Everyone lives happily ever after. Because love is all you need.

OK, so that is the plot of The Parent Trap, a great film about love, friendship, parenting, and romance. The Nancy Meyers version was popular when it came out in 1998 and is still streamed so often people think it is the only version of the movie (there are actually several, and an original wartime German novel). It sets up the idea that love is the only thing that matters and it is a mysterious force that can persist across continents. It gives us a lot to live up to.

What search data tells us is that we really do want to fall in love.

As a society we are currently going through what former US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy called an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” We see that in Google Trends data too: “How to not be lonely” is at an all-time high in the US in search. “Many of us felt lonely or isolated in a way we had never experienced before,” wrote Murthy about the COVID crisis. “Many lost loved ones. We experienced feelings of anxiety, stress, fear, sadness, grief, anger, and pain through the loss of these moments, rituals, celebrations, and relationships.”

Relationships have always been hard, but they’re perhaps harder now than they’ve ever been. “Love is real,” sang John Lennon. Our response in search? “What is love?” It is one of the top-searched questions of all time, within the top ten globally.

There are also spikes for searches such as “How to overcome loneliness,” “Why do I have no friends?,” and “anxious attachment.” Just as there are spikes in anxiety overall, relationships seem to be something we want to have but question if we deserve them. Life is complicated, nowhere more so than in the relationships we have with others.

In his landmark 2000 book Bowling Alone, Robert D. Putnam argues that American community life and civic engagement have declined significantly since the mid-twentieth century, with serious consequences for individuals and society. With online dating we have more ways to meet people than ever before, yet search data shows that we still want to understand the basics and perhaps feel entirely alone, when in fact people are doing the same thing all over the world, at the same time: “What does love feel like?,” “What is unconditional love?,” “What does love mean?”

So, what do we search for when we’re looking for love? How do we know when we have found it, and how do we maintain our relationships with those we care about most? For an emotion that is everywhere—in songs, movies, novels, and poetry from the beginning of time—love is something we want to understand and to recognize when we see it. If we look at the most-asked questions of all time, worldwide, love and relationships show up constantly throughout the data.

And we of course want to experience it: “How long does it take to fall in love?” is a top-trending query, as is “How to make someone fall in love with you.” At the romance stage of a relationship, we search for “love quotes” (it is the top quotation search of all time). We ask “Can guys and girls be friends?” We also ask “Can you die from a broken heart?” What strikes me about these questions is how much they are based on an idea of romance and love that we may not be sure is real, but hope is.

As we saw in chapter 4, “What…” searches often take place at the beginning of an event, when we don’t understand the way things work and want to get a sense of what something is. “What is love?” is a great example of that, a search based on trying to make sense of the seemingly unexplainable.

“How…” searches, by contrast, are again all about action. “How to get a girl to like you,” one of the top searches, is about doing something. “How can I get someone to like me?” is asking for tips and advice, not an explanation of what something is. It’s the real-life version of the 1971 film The Go-Between, where a boy carries messages between two forbidden lovers (actually, there’s a lot more to The Go-Between than that, but you get the idea). Here, the go-between is the web, helping us to understand an enduring mystery—and what to do about it.

“How…” is searched a third more than “Why…” when it comes to romance, which reinforces that bias toward action when it comes to matters of the heart. We want to know how to get a girl/boy to like us, “how to talk to girls” and “how to get out of the friend zone,” and, more practically, “how to write a love letter.”

“How to kiss” is the top-searched relationship “How to…” in search. A lot of these questions are often sweet and innocent, and show how romantic we can be. Our lack of self-confidence and the desire to know what to do come through in two of the top-trending searches: “How to keep a conversation going with a girl” and “How to keep a conversation going with a boy.”

There is no shortage of advice from popular culture. “Love song” is nearly ten times more searched than “breakup song,” and “songs about love” is the top-searched “songs about…” of all time. The Beatles, Adele, and Bruno Mars are the top artists searched with “love songs,” while Pretty Woman is the top-searched romantic comedy movie, worldwide, of all time. The Sex and the City movie is second, which would not be my personal choice for a romantic comedy, but then, I am weird and would probably choose His Girl Friday, the fast-talking 1940 screwball comedy about reporters with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, which may be the best film about journalistic relationships ever made. The point is, it’s personal. That film resonates for me; for someone else it will be the affairs of Carrie Bradshaw and her friends.

Top-searched romantic comedy movies

Worldwide, since 2004

1. Pretty Woman

2. Sex and the City

3. 10 Things I Hate About You

4. The Proposal

5. Clueless

6. Just Go With It

7. Sex and the City 2

8. No Strings Attached

9. Easy A

10. 50 First Dates

11. Hitch

12. Serendipity

13. Knocked Up

14. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days

15. He’s Just Not That Into You

16. Forgetting Sarah Marshall

17. She’s All That

18. When Harry Met Sally…

19. There’s Something About Mary

20. 27 Dresses

This list is interesting because it’s global, and speaks to a common shared experience around culture and idealized relationships. I asked Google’s Gemini AI to summarize the typical plotline of a rom-com and it was pretty spot on: “A typical romantic comedy follows two initially mismatched individuals who overcome obstacles and misunderstandings, often through humorous situations and growing attraction, to ultimately find love and a happy ending.”

That feature of misunderstandings and botched communications is a running theme of these searches. And when it comes to trying to express emotions in different languages, everything is amplified. What would you guess the top-searched “How to say I love you in…” is? French perhaps? In fact it’s Spanish, followed by Japanese and then French. (What you can’t see in the list below is number twenty-four. Yes, we also ask how to say “I love you in dog.”)

Interestingly, among the top countries searching for love is Yemen, which has seen enduring conflicts in recent history, but has a tradition of public displays of love and affection between both lovers and friends.

Knowing that love is an indefinable feeling that is still in the main unexplained, a lot of the queries are about how to know whether it’s real or not. We want to know “Is it love or lust?,” “Is love at first sight real?,” and “Are soulmates real?” Much of this is about trust—can we trust our feelings or what we’ve been told we should feel? The phrase “love at first sight” is searched for so often it is a topic in Google Trends; it shows up in different countries, in different languages, around the world. It is another search constant, with roughly equivalent search interest everywhere.

We’ve also seen a globalization of search terms that are new, and that happen at particular times of the year. One example, as we saw in chapter 1, is “cuffing season,” which has spiked between September and November every year since 2011.

If you do find that person to cozy up with, hopefully it’s because you also find them attractive, but is that enough? In 1972, researchers wanted to test a simple theory: that attractiveness equals goodness, at least in the way we perceive it. They found there’s a halo effect that we might not like to admit, but it’s real. The men and women in the study associated positive attributes with people they found attractive. In short, we are more likely to think that people we are attracted to physically are kind, or good. The study has a great title: “What Is Beautiful Is Good.” Does that effect apply to the way we search when we’re attracted to someone?

Search suggests that even if looks alone are enough to start a relationship, they will not be enough to maintain it. How do we know that? “The ick” reached an all-time high in search in 2024. It means a feeling of disgust toward someone you were previously attracted to.

Top “Why…” searches around romance

US, all-time

1. does love hurt?

2. do we fall in love?

3. do I have commitment issues?

4. am I afraid of commitment?

5. do otters hold hands?

6. are men afraid of commitment?

7. hasn’t he texted me?

8. get married?

9. do I love my wife?

“Why hasn’t he texted me?” seems exactly the kind of query that search is made for. Conceptually, I love this search: it’s so human, there’s no right or wrong answer, and it seems simple but is shrouded in mystery.

Search suggests that we feel our first dates have to be perfect. “Dating prompts” reached an all-time high in 2024, and “dating app” reached an all-time high in February 2024. Also in that year, “standards test” and “standards calculator” became breakout searches because of a test made to show people how high or low their dating standards are. And that is reflected by the reality of the way we date, with a third of US adults saying they use apps, and about half of those under thirty (53%) saying they have used a dating site or app. We look for “first date ideas,” the top activities searched (in the US) being, respectively, museum, dinner, miniature golf, bowling, and ice skating. Also showing up is “escape room,” which seems like a risky activity with someone you might have just met.

Then there are the relationships that escape definition. Are you partners or just friends in a relationship? There’s a term for this, and it is being searched now more than at any time in history: “situationship.”

In the past, when we needed advice about love, romance, and everything in between, we turned to agony columns. Originally, the front page of Victorian newspapers provided advice for anonymous readers too embarrassed to seek help from their family and friends. I can remember when “agony aunts” were all the rage on TV and in magazines—they became public personas, representing a new age of freedom and honesty—and this trend has continued into the new millennium. If you needed to know what to do about your partner, one solution was to ask for advice from someone who seemed to have all the answers, and arguably this led to greater openness about sexuality and relationships owing to the willingness to tackle taboos.

But search interest for advice columns has never been lower than it is today. During COVID in 2020, searches for “help with relationship” overtook searches for “advice column.” Is it possible that the internet has become our agony aunt nowadays? It’s not a perfect analogy but it does represent something real happening in search.

What strikes me is how many searches tip into the practical, especially when it comes to getting married. “Who pays for the wedding?” is among the top three “Who pays…” searches of all time (following “Who pays what?” and “Who pays taxes?”). “Where can I get a marriage license?” is the top “Where…” search around weddings. And a lot of them make sense: “Do men wear engagement rings?,” for instance, “Do you give a gift at an engagement party?,” and “Does the groom go to the bridal shower?”

The top “Why…” question is “Why do people throw rice at weddings?,” and “If someone objects at a wedding does the wedding stop?” is the top “If…” question asked about marriage.

If that was all wedding searches were, then they might be of little interest here. But there is another phenomenon that makes the data valuable for understanding changing social attitudes. While the topic has been constantly searched since Google Trends data began, there was a big spike in search for marriage in 2015 when the US Supreme Court made same-sex marriage legal.

The Personal Is Political is the title of an essay published by feminist Carol Hanisch in 1970, and that phrase endures today, in strong attitudes about our relationships and who we love as humans. And is there a more personal issue than who you marry? In the 2000s, same-sex marriage became a major political issue in the US after it was legalized in Massachusetts in 2004. Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post looked at how those searches changed in the decade that followed, and found a nation essentially chilling out around gay marriage as time progressed. The top search query around the topic in 2004 was “against gay marriage,” but gradually, as attitudes changed, the top queries became more informational—not expressing an opinion but finding out more information instead. The top queries in 2014 and 2015 were “gay marriage states” and “marriage equality.”

Before 2008, online searches related to gay marriage were predominantly focused on arguments against it. However, following the passage of Proposition 8 in California (which was later reversed), which banned same-sex marriage, there was a noticeable change. People began searching for more neutral information, such as which states allowed gay marriage. And when you look at the data state by state, you can see how the country shifted in just a few years, from negative searches such as “stop gay marriage” to informational searches such as “How many states allow gay marriage?”

This is Google Trends being used to get a sense of how a country changed its mind, and adapted to a new reality.

“What is a friend?”

We’re not super confident about friendships either: one of the top-trending queries is “What is a friend?” One of the top-trending searches related to friendship is “Valentine’s Day,” which suggests the greatest service good friends can perform is to celebrate that holiday with each other. “Best friend Halloween costumes” is another breakout holiday-related search.

The nature of friendships has changed too. We have an idea that a friendship needs to encompass more than just hanging out. We just don’t know what that means. There’s research to show that strong social connections are linked to a longer life, with studies suggesting they’re as impactful as quitting smoking or regular exercise.

Top “How to make friends…” searches (excludes app features like “How to make friends private on Facebook”)

US, all-time

1. as an adult

2. in a new city

3. near me

4. at college

5. in middle school

Even just being friends can cause confusion that shows up in Google Trends data. “Can men and women just be friends?” is the top “Can…” asked about friendship; “Do best friends cuddle?” and “Do I need friends?” are the top “Do…” searches around friendship. But then, “How to get out of the friend zone” is a breakout search too, suggesting our friendship searches might evolve into falling-in-love searches.

Search interest in “pen pal” has been on the decline since 2004—we are a long way now from the pen pals we used to send letters to (under duress) when I was at school. When I explain to my children that we used to write letters on paper and post them to strangers, they cannot believe that was ever a thing.

So, here’s a theory. Our friendships have become more important to us since the 2000s, which explains why “friend” is more searched now than at any time in Google search history. In fact, “friendship” is over twice more searched than “intimate relationship.” But that comes with greater expectations of what friendships should be. Our friendships matter to us: we want to know “What makes a good friend?” and “What is a true friend?” (they are top-searched). And “Is there an app to make friends?” was the top “Is…” search for friendships in 2024, with “Where to meet friends?” the top “Where…” search.

Sometimes friendships simply cannot live up to the expectations we have for them. The top “Why…” searches around friendship are pretty revealing: “Why can’t I make friends?” and “Why do I feel sad after hanging out with friends?” “Negging” (being negative about someone to manipulate them—a term coined in the 1990s) reached an all-time high in 2024. Sometimes we just fall out of friendships: “How to end a friendship” is at an all-time high.

Types of friendships spiking in search recently

Worldwide, 2024

“STEM friend”—a friend involved in science and technology

“Floater friend”—one who disappears for weeks on end then reappears as if nothing has happened

“Play friend”—one you enjoy an activity with

“Medium friend”—more than an acquaintance, less than a best friend

“Phone friend”—a friendship that exists on the phone but not in real life

“When to let go of a relationship”

So much of search is about the beginnings of love, it’s true, but building a longer-lasting relationship leads us there too. Searches for “relationship” are at an all-time high, and we also search for how to maintain love over time. Challenges that are an inevitable part of life show up too. We ask “Do long-distance relationships work?” and “Do I have commitment issues?”

Sometimes, the relationship is just over. But working out when that time is seems particularly challenging. “When is it time to break up?” is the top-searched “When…” about romance in recent years. “When to leave a relationship” is another. And for those already searching about troubled relationships, they ask, “When do you know your marriage is over?” more than “When to file for bankruptcy.” People want to know “When is enough in a relationship?”

In the US, “relationship advice” is the top-trending search for advice (more than “financial” or “legal”), and “How to be alone” is more searched than “How to be in a relationship.” There’s one search we’ve seen trending more recently too: “Is taking a break in a relationship healthy?”

Only twelve out of fifty states in the US search “How to get over a cold” more than “How to get over a breakup,” with New Jersey seemingly the most lovelorn of all. A breakup can feel existential in nature, and we see that with “Can you die from a broken heart?” being the top-searched “Can you die from…” Marriage may be searched three times more than divorce, but statistically divorce will happen in roughly half of marriages. From 2004 to June 2008, “wedding planners” was more searched than “divorce lawyers,” but ever since then “divorce lawyers” has been more searched.

And why is Tulsa, Oklahoma, the top place searching for marriage counseling in the world? It turns out that Tulsa also has a higher divorce rate than almost any other major US city—another example of the data mirroring reality.

The top “Why…” searches around relationships also suggest bitter experience expressing itself. Adultery is actually less searched now than it was in 2011, when a number of high-profile breakups made the news. Even so, it’s a devastating list.

Top “Why…” searches around relationships

US, all-time

1. do men cheat?

2. do people cheat?

3. do women cheat?

4. do married men cheat?

5. do men lie?

There are harder topics too, such as “Why is my partner yelling at me?” When we look at the top-searched “Do I have…issues” of the past year, they are mostly if not all about relationships, and some hint at real difficulties. There’s also a suggestion of some introspection (although you have to squint to find it): “Why do I cheat?” We also looked at the top-searched “Do I have…issues” of all time, and they also point to a world where we all have our own issues to deal with. The top-searched is “Do I have anger issues?,” followed by “trust,” “daddy,” and “commitment.”

“How to mend a broken heart” is not just the gist of the definitive breakup song by Al Green, it is also asked by those searching about troubled relationships. Yet it seems that divorces and breakups do not seem to stem optimism about the future. Those searching for relationship issues also search for “How to trust again.”

As couples face challenges in their long-term relationships, we also see a determination to help each other overcome the more serious aspects of life. For example, we looked at the top-searched “How to love someone…” and they are all about helping, caring, and, yes, loving. “How to love someone with depression” is top, followed by “anxiety.” But we search for renewed relationships too: “How to love someone again,” and “How to love someone unconditionally.” The stories behind these simply worded searches reveal the sheer scale and complexity of human interaction. Couples often make huge decisions every day to carry on under conditions that would be unimaginable to anyone outside their relationship.

Old age is among the top five trending topics searched with loneliness, which is perhaps why many decide to, in the words of English poet Robert Browning, “grow old along with me! The best is yet to be.” But as ephemeral as first love or any kind of relationship at any age can be, there’s lots of evidence that we look for permanence. The top-trending search using the words “that lasts”?

“Love that lasts.”

8

“Why do toddlers bite?”

Every night, some time around two a.m., the same two words spike in search across the US and UK: “baby” and “sleep.” Parenting is like being adrift on a raft you made yourself, on an ocean you were swept into without navigation. Each passenger had a different idea about how to make the raft and at some point all the other occupants will start griping about how big it is and the materials you used to put it together. Everyone you know who isn’t on the raft would probably have made it entirely differently too, and deep in your heart you know that. You can’t make it across the ocean alone, however, and if you survive it’s because of your fellow passengers. Parenting is a long journey, a mix of contradictory emotions. It is difficult, rewarding, fun, scary, and the most important thing I have ever been a part of.

And that is reflected every day (and night) in the way we search.

I like to believe that my daughter and son know how they became the center of everything in our lives—children always notice much more than you think. Like the Marvel Cinematic Universe timelines, their arrivals are “branch points” in our lives. They are the moments that changed everything, and nothing was ever the same afterward. Because sometimes I can barely believe that I’m a parenting adult, albeit married to a much more calm, competent, and creative one.

“Should I have kids?”

Birth rates in the US have been declining since the 1990s and really started to fall off a cliff some time before 2004, which is when Google Trends data reaches back to. Searches for “parenting” have remained the same for as long as they have existed—with one exception. March 2022 saw one of the spikes in search. The world was just coming out of COVID and masking restrictions were starting to be relaxed. We were just beginning to come to grips with the long-term emotional impact of shutdowns on our children. That we would be searching more about parenting appears to be backed up by research from the year before about how parents were looking for information to help their kids.

One factor that runs through parenthood for most of us is something we would rather not have to worry about: money. The cost of raising a child has increased steadily across the world, with the average moving north of $330,000 in the US and £223,000 in the UK. And it’s not getting cheaper. “Cost of daycare” reached an all-time high in 2024. In addition, “Should parents pay for college?” is the top-searched “Should parents…”

In such a climate, it is no surprise that we ask if we should have kids at all. Searches for that query are at a record high, and it is more searched in the US than any other country. We also ask how many children we should have: the top place in the US searching for that is Oklahoma, which at 2.53 children per household is actually pretty close to the average. By contrast, Utah has the largest average household size, at 3.08. That’s a lot of babies.

New parents are getting older. The average age of a new mother now is twenty-nine, compared to twenty-one in 1970, and a fifth of all pregnancies in the US are in women aged thirty-five and older—a trend we see in searches too. If we look at “have kids at” for 2023–2024, we see searches spiking for “Can you have kids at 25?,” “Is it safe to have kids at 40?,” and “Can you have kids at 50?” And for “What is a geriatric pregnancy?” (a slightly outdated term used for mothers over thirty-five).

But when we look at the top “When…” searches around families of all time, we see this showing up too: “When is the best time to get pregnant?”

Really, we don’t know anything useful, it seems. “Where do babies come from?” is the top “Where…” search about families.

Pregnancy plunges us into something we like to avoid in our everyday lives: uncertainty. I remember the constant anxiety of not knowing anything. Will the pregnancy last? What are we having? How will our lives change? It is a time when all of the carefully constructed parts of our lives shift as we get used to the idea of a new person coming into the world.

And the top-searched “What…” question about babies of all time? “What will my baby look like?”

That’s assuming that everything goes according to plan. Searches for miscarriages showed a distinct spike in 2020, during the pandemic, and there has been some research to suggest that miscarriage rates were actually higher then than in previous years. Below are the questions that were searched in Britain about miscarriage over the period of a year. It is a heartbreaking list, and the results would be the same in pretty much any country on earth at any time.

Top-searched questions about miscarriage

UK, 2023–2024

1. What does a miscarriage look like?

2. What causes miscarriage?

3. How long does a miscarriage last?

4. What is a missed miscarriage?

5. What does a miscarriage feel like?

6. How long does miscarriage bleeding last?

7. How many pregnancies end in miscarriage?

8. What does an early miscarriage look like?

9. How soon after a miscarriage can you get pregnant?

10. What to say to someone who has had a miscarriage?

“What to say to someone who has had a miscarriage?” illustrates that recurring trend we see in search data: wanting to help someone who is suffering but not knowing how to begin. It is one of the top “What to say to someone…” searches, although in the UK it is just below “What to say to someone going on maternity leave?,” which reflects another reality of pregnancy: being able to afford to have a baby and being given time off work to do so, luxuries that are still not available in every country on earth.

At one level, pregnancy and birth should feel like processes we already know everything about. They have been around forever, so what could possibly remain unknown at this stage in humanity’s existence? And yet one of the top-searched “Why…” questions about families in 2023–2024 was “Why do women give birth on their backs?”

“Who determines the sex of the baby?” is the top-searched “Who…” around families, and “girl names” is more searched than “boy names” in every state in the US, suggesting either that we put more thought into them than into boys’ names or we are perhaps prepared to be more imaginative with girls’ names. One trending query was “Is it OK to name your child Lucifer?” (illegal in New Zealand but still a thing, apparently).

Wondering whether you might be pregnant, especially very early on in the process, also brings with it many challenges. We ask “How far along am I?,” for example, which also illustrates how when we ask search something we often use “I” to describe ourselves. It might be “Why am I so gassy?,” “Why can’t I fall asleep?,” or “Why do I feel nauseous when I wake up?” (all of which can also apply to pregnancy).

“Nepo baby,” short for “nepotism baby,” is one of those queries that just didn’t exist in search before around 2022. It’s common now, largely thanks to its emergence on social media to describe the children of celebrities gaining their own success. This shows how new words and phrases simply emerge and become part of our everyday lives in ways we couldn’t imagine.

A lot of pregnancy searches are actually about celebrities. As I write this, the top celebrity pregnancy statuses we searched for were Kim Kardashian, Carrie Underwood, and Beyoncé. By the time you read this, it will almost certainly be someone else. Buried within the same searches are a number of “what can you do while pregnant” questions that are all about how modern life interacts with something that has happened forever. Queries such as these ones, which all have “Yes, but…” answers: “Can you dye your hair while pregnant?,” “Can you have sex while pregnant?,” “Can you drink coffee while pregnant?”

“Why do babies cry?”

Once a baby is born, many of the queries shift to simply keeping them alive and also show how everything is new and nothing is obvious. Take the top-searched “Why do babies…” of all time. They are consistent because for each new generation of parents the questions are the same: we ask “Why do babies cry?,” “Why do babies get hiccups?,” and “Why do babies spit up?”—and I challenge any parent to say they haven’t wondered those things repeatedly in the first weeks of their child’s life.

In fact, “Why do babies…” has been steadily increasing since 2006 and reached an all-time high in 2024, and “When do babies…” did the same. New parents worry constantly about the stages of their child’s development and we want to know when different things happen so we can get a frame of reference.

But which of the various stages matters most to us? At the early stage, anything is everything, and it’s interesting that the trending list reflects the desire for feedback. The impact of your baby smiling at you, for instance, can have a brain-altering effect on a parent, according to one study that mapped brain patterns of adults exposed to baby expressions.

Some of the questions asked are just basic curiosity—for instance, “Do babies have kneecaps?” The answer is that they don’t at birth. Interesting, right?

Often, being a parent feels like you’re waiting for one stage to be over so you can move on to the next, perhaps because the amount of information about parenting we absorb at pregnancy and birth is much more than we consume about their later years. “Infant” is over twice more searched with parenting than “toddler” or “teenager” nowadays in the US. If I could tell my younger self anything, it would be to just enjoy each stage as it happens, although that is easier said than done.

If there’s one sign that parenting can be challenging it’s the fact that “support group for parents” is the top-searched “support group for…,” and when babies turn into toddlers, a whole new set of things to manage crops up.

There are patterns to the data that repeat every year. For instance, “infant sleep training” spikes annually in January worldwide and is searched more now than ever before. Sleep is understandably an obsession in search, dominating many of the queries around young children. We also ask ourselves about how we should behave in front of our kids—for instance, “Is it OK to cry in front of your children?”

One thing about being a parent today is that we have more information and resources at our disposal than perhaps any generation in history, which also means we have the opportunity to be more aware of every aspect of raising children than any other generation in history.

The world is searching “Why do toddlers…” more than ever before, and the top-searched query in recent times has been “Why do toddlers bite?” The answers are the same as they have been for all time: they’re teething, or feeling frustrated and unable to communicate. If we look at data from all time in Google Trends, the top “Why do toddlers…” is “hit,” but the results are close.

If you read this list and know very little about young children, you might assume that having one is a never-ending stream of upsetting behavior. I actually think it shows something different: when we search these queries as parents, we are looking for help because we don’t know what to do. It’s a collective therapy session in a way, trying to understand something the majority of us go through.

We looked at the top “How to help kids…” queries of all time, and they speak to a lot of caring but also a lot of love. We really are just trying to do the best we can. It means we search for “How to help kids with anxiety,” and “How to help kids with ADHD.” Autistic spectrum disorder searches around children reached an all-time high in 2024, as did searches for teens and anxiety. Both of those conditions have seen record high rates for teenagers in recent years. “Kids therapy” also reached an all-time high in 2024. On the other hand, the data shows it’s often about being able to offer the best advice for something that matters to both children and their parents, as in “How to help kids make friends.” The evidence suggests that is something society still needs to work on. In fact, “How to help kids…” searches have reached an all-time high recently.

In some cases, of course, we worry that there is something more serious happening, which is a mix of the hopeful and the concerning:

Top “How to know if your child…” searches

US, all-time

- has ADHD

- has autism

- is gifted

- is dyslexic

Parenting itself has changed over time, and parenting styles are being searched more now than ever before, with “koala parenting” and “intensive parenting” the top-trending “parenting” searches in the US right now. Some of the trends show the changing mores of parenting. For instance, for the first ten years of Google search in the US (2004 to 2014), “co-sleeping” was over three times more searched than “infant sleep training,” but in the last ten years (2014 to 2024), infant sleep training has been more searched. Of course, one thing about children is that they can lure you into a false sense of success. One moment they are sleeping through the night, the next they are waking up at 3:45 a.m. It’s why “sleep regression” reached an all-time high in 2024.

New parents are reading new theories of parenting, and some make the decision to adopt those. In America, for instance, there has been a trend over the past few years to ask “What is a…mom?” over various approaches to being a parent. Back in 2011, it was searches for “tiger mother,” after Amy Chua’s book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was published. In parenting terms, 2011 is the other end of the universe, however; now parents in the US are just as likely to search for terms such as “almond mom” (obsessed with “healthy” or “clean” eating), “wasp mom” (visibly White Anglo-Saxon Protestant), “gummy bear mom” (opposite of an almond mother, relaxed about food), and “crunchy mom” (natural and holistic lifestyle). The different theories of parenting themselves have become popular in search too, and the variety is head-spinning. The top-searched “What is…parenting?” is “attachment parenting,” followed by “authoritative parenting,” which is a leap from one end of the spectrum to the other.

If all this seems collectively confusing, that’s because it is. There’s a reason why “When does parenting get easier?” is one of the top-trending parenting searches.

“Should kids have phones?”

Any parent will tell you that the latest stage of their child’s development feels like the most challenging, but as they get older, new questions continually arise. It’s impossible to track searches over a long period of time but we can see how those for toddlers (“Should parents limit screen time?”) evolve into something else entirely by the time the kids are at high school: “Should parents pay for college?”

Having children at a time when they have the world’s technology at hand brings with it new questions that parents have to deal with, including how to handle access to it. Ironically, in an age when all of us are entertained constantly at all times, “boredom” reached a ten-year high in search in 2024. We ask “Should kids have phones?” more than any other “Should kids have…” question.

There’s also lots of evidence that children being safe online is a top concern for parents. “Parental controls” spikes every December in search, and “child” is the top demographic searched with internet safety.

But if fears about online safety and children show up in search, so do concerns about how your child is growing up. What sort of person will they become? A lot of the “Why do kids…” searches are similar to those we ask about toddlers, in that parents assume each development is permanent, so they tend to be more negative, reflecting parents’ concerns.

Searches about kids also give us a sense of a changing society. For instance, in 2023–2024 we could see which “classes for kids” were trending, and they are enlightening. Number one in the US was etiquette, followed by crochet. It seems we want well-mannered children who can entertain themselves with yarn. But that varies by nation. In Australia, the top trend was coding classes, in Canada it was boxing classes, and in the UK it was online art classes and in-person parkour classes.

As children get older, we are also more likely to doubt ourselves. Searches for both “Am I a good dad?” and “Am I a good mom?” (in the US, of course, “mum” elsewhere) have reached record highs, with mothers it seems doubting themselves more than fathers.

It’s perfectly normal that kids gradually get introduced to all the nuances and experiences the world has to offer. When my daughter was three and out for a walk one autumn day, she pointed at a spider’s web and explained what it was. “Daddy, it’s a website,” she said. It was a visual way to describe a word she had heard but didn’t yet understand. It’s also one of the reasons I love infographics and data visualizations so much: they give us a method to describe a story in terms we intuitively understand. It’s also why I wrote infographics books for children. Psychologists have known for a while that showing rather than just telling a child works. One study compared children who had been told something verbally to others who had only been shown an image. The children shown the pictures were more likely to retain that information and recall it later. It reflects a truth that has been known by some for thousands of years. “Without image, thinking is impossible,” said Aristotle.

And sometimes parents have to paint a picture of a world that is endlessly complex and difficult to grasp. We all want certainty, not just children. The world gives us the opposite. For example, “talk to kids about race” became a breakout search in May 2020 after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. And searches for “bulletproof backpack” first spiked in August 2007, the week after a school shooting in Newark, New Jersey.

The top “How to tell kids…” searches show us trying to explain things it has always been important for parents to discuss with their children (sex, for example). Other complex issues—death and divorce, for instance—show up too. And that reflects reality for a lot of children, many of them with two parents living in different places. Although divorce searches have remained relatively steady over time, “co-parenting” reached an all-time high in 2024.

Top “How to tell kids…” searches

US, all-time

1. about divorce

2. about Santa

3. about death

4. about separation

5. you’re pregnant

We worry as parents about children having to grow up too soon, while for some it is already a reality. Some children are being expected to take on the roles of adults at a very young age, cooking and cleaning, or managing the younger members of the family. It’s called “parentification,” and it has reached an all-time high in search.

There have been other big social upheavals too. One of the most significant for our long-term well-being is that parents are increasingly living longer and needing care from their children. Historically, search interest in “take care of kids” has been greater than that of “take care of parents.” However, “take care of parents” overtook it in search from January 2023.

This is the “sandwich generation” in data, adults who look after both parents and children. Nearly a quarter of all adults in the US looking after a parent also have a child to look after, and some estimates suggest there are more than six million adults affected in the UK. The “sandwich generation” is real and growing and searched more than ever before worldwide, topped by Indonesia, Singapore, and the United States. The list is interesting because Asian countries have a strong tradition of family-based care of elderly relatives, while many would argue that Western countries sometimes fall short. For example, Indonesia, the top country on earth searching for “sandwich generation,” is undergoing a major social restructuring, according to research from the Asian Development Bank, with a new, very old dynamic: “The fastest-growing group is composed of the ‘older olds’ (i.e. people over 80 years of age), and there are more women over 60 years of age than men.” However, the list also includes countries where there are issues around family-based care, such as the US, Canada, and Australia.

One thing that is apparent across searches around parenting is that when we search, we’re often not treating the process as entering a query to be answered through technology. We are thinking in the first person. You can see that in searches like “Why am I not getting pregnant?” and “Can I drink while pregnant?” or even “Am I a good parent?” Partly this is because the way we search has just become more colloquial over time, using speech or generative AI. It is one of the fascinating parts of search data where our humanity shines through.

But even when we ask, we still think of the question, and the answers we get, as personal to us. Again, we may feel like we are doing something on our own, but all over the world other people are doing the same thing.

There’s some comfort to be taken from that, next time your toddler bites you.

9

“Why is grief so lonely?”

There’s no reason you should know Janet. She lived in England and was a sister, mum, and grandmother who loved reality TV shows, read voraciously, and played online word games with friends (and strangers who became friends too). She was an artist and designer whose paintings were sometimes on TV or in galleries across Europe and in the US. She was once named “Promising Artist of the Year” and her work appeared in the Royal Academy. She married a blues guitarist turned teacher, and they had two sons. One of them was me.

She painted or drew every day, and my brother and I are visual people because of her talent for seeing the love and the art in everything. People who met her just once will recall a time she said something warm or generous that changed their day or made them see things in a different way. She was full of hugs even when we were too cool as teenagers to realize how special they were.

She died six months before I started writing this book.

I had lost relatives I loved deeply before, but nothing quite like this. One day we had a mum, the next we didn’t.

The questions were endless. Why did this happen? How long would it take to get a death certificate? How do I understand the cause of death? Why do I feel this way? How long does it last?

None of it made any sense. But it turns out that none of it makes any sense to anyone. One thing about working with search data every day is we can see how no one is truly alone in their emotions, or really the first to experience anything, although it often feels like it.

What do we really know about grief? Not a lot. And more than that, that lack of knowledge can hit hard when the time comes to find out about it.

Top searches about grief

US, all-time

1. What are the stages of grief?

2. What is bereavement leave?

3. What to say to someone grieving?

4. What is bargaining in grief?

5. What to say to a grieving friend?

6. What does the Bible say about grief?

7. How to get over grief?

8. Is grief an emotion?

9. What to say to a grieving mother?

10. How does grief affect the brain?

The questions start with the informational, “How does grief affect the brain?,” or the intensely practical, “What is bereavement leave?” These are the kinds of questions we see a lot of on search—how to do something when you really need to do it. These kinds of searches have grown exponentially over the two decades of the data’s history. In fact, searches for the word “how” are higher now than at any time in Google Trends history.

It speaks to the fact that we often don’t know where to begin when big life moments happen to us, and we might even be too embarrassed to ask someone. So we jump online and search.

Some of the questions are really about trying to make sense of the unimaginable. In her book on grief It’s OK That You’re Not OK, Megan Devine writes: “This really is as bad as you think…The reality of grief is far different from what others see from the outside. There is pain in this world that you can’t be cheered out of.”

“Is death real?” and “Is death painful?” are the top “Is death…” searches.

Grief can be all-consuming, and the feelings can be as much physical as emotional. Just take the top “cans” related to grief: “Can grief make you sick?” and “Can you die from grief?” The overwhelming nature of loss comes through again and again.

Top “Does…” searches related to grief

US, all-time

- grief make you tired?

- grief ever go away?

- bereavement cover grandparents?

- bereavement cover uncles?

One thing that really struck me about the last two on this list is the sense that somehow we might not be entitled to our grief, that losing a grandparent is less harrowing than losing a parent, for example. It is not, by the way. When Mum died, our children lost their grandmother too. She had taught my daughter how to use watercolor paints and my son to pursue what he cared about most in life, and I know that their loss is just as keenly felt as mine. A loss is a loss, and I can’t believe that one is really more deserving of grief than another. Yet at some level we feel that way.

There’s a term for that feeling: “disenfranchised grief.” It comes from a book by Kenneth Doka, one of the world’s foremost experts on grief and loss. He describes it like this: “grief that persons experience when they incur a loss that is not or cannot be openly acknowledged, socially sanctioned, or publicly mourned.” If ever there was a time for social conventions to be less important than what you’re feeling, it’s when someone dies. Grief is grief, no matter who it is for. Yet we need that acknowledgment that our grief is real for it to feel real to us too.

Wanting to do the right thing but not knowing how to is a theme that comes through in the questions too, and we’re going to explore that later in this chapter. Questions like “What to say to someone grieving?” or “What to say to a grieving friend?” or even the awful “What to say to a grieving mother?” speak to that fear of saying the wrong thing, or appearing insensitive.

Trying to work out how best to help others is also a theme that comes through again and again in this data. It makes sense that when someone you know has lost someone close to them, you want to help—but you also want to do it in the right way. One thing I learned is that, perhaps, there is no right way, although simply knowing that someone is there can sometimes be enough.

Death and taxes

Benjamin Franklin famously wrote: “In this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.” It turns out that one of those is searched more than the other, and it has nothing to do with HMRC (or the IRS in the US).

Searches for death have been pretty flat over time, for as long as Google Trends data has existed. There have been fluctuations, but like searches for taxes, they have been steady for nearly twenty years. Through 2019, searches for death and taxes matched each other. There is one big difference, however: searches for tax spike every year in April, when people submit their returns in the UK and file in the US. Then they drop off as we try to forget about it for the next twelve months. Death is different in that it is a constant.

And then March 2020 happened. The world was hit by a once-in-a-century pandemic. COVID killed seven million people around the world, 1.1 million of them in the US. In 2020, life expectancy actually went down by nearly two years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and death rates increased by 17%. In 2020, COVID was the third leading cause of death. Just a few years later, that seems a distant memory. But the data hasn’t recovered as fast as we think from this huge collective trauma—we have carried on searching about death at a higher rate than at any time in US history. Searches for grief worldwide have quadrupled since 2004, when Google Trends data began. In fact, they have never been higher than right now. In the twenty or so years since 2004, Americans have searched about death more than films, TV, even baseball. And in Britain, death even overtook searches for football, although the beautiful game has since resumed its customary place, after the spike in 2020.

And again we can see how devastating moments in real life affect the data. In 2022, for example, the year of the Uvalde school shooting in Texas, the San Angelo, TX, metro area was among the top five metro areas searching for grief. And that sort of spike is not going to just disappear, as news coverage might. For nine years in the Hartford and New Haven metro area in Connecticut, the highest point of grief searches came in December. Hartford and New Haven includes the town of Newtown, home of Sandy Hook Elementary School. December was the month (in 2012) of one of the worst school shootings in American history, when twenty-six were killed at Sandy Hook, including twenty children aged six and seven.

The universal suffering around grief is just that. It makes no difference where you live. In every country in the world where there is Google Trends data, searches for grief show up. It’s quite rare for that to be the case. Most topics have some strong regional variations. But grief searches show up everywhere, although there are still large differences in how grief is searched. The emotions might be the same wherever you are, but the way we look for them varies.

Here’s the list of top countries searching for grief from 2004 to 2024:

1. Israel

2. Honduras

3. Panama

4. Guatemala

5. New Zealand

The stability of this list, over the course of most of Google Trends’ history, is quite unusual. Most Google Trends data shifts and changes repeatedly. It’s the ultimate ephemeral dataset for that reason. After COVID, for example, there were some small moves—the UK and Argentina moved up the rankings before they settled back to the established order. So why is it that these countries search more for grief than any other countries on earth? Some of them have seen many conflicts and much violence. Perhaps we might expect to see some of them on this list.

But each country searches in its own way. In the US, for instance, the top related searches to grief are around treatment and, I would argue, action: “Grief counseling near me,” “What does grief mean?,” and “grief therapist.” In Britain, those searches do show up, but there are also more around how to say or do the right thing—“What to say to someone who is grieving?,” for instance.

“How long does grief last?”

Six months after Mum died, someone asked me what she was like. That was all it took: I started crying, and didn’t stop for an hour. It turns out you can’t shortcut grief. It takes as long as it takes and no less. But we can do everything faster nowadays, so why not grief? That’s certainly the tone of a lot of search data.

Top searches about grief and process

US, all-time

1. How do I stop grieving?

2. How do I process grief?

3. How do I know if I’ve moved on from grieving?

4. How long is each stage of grief?

5. How long does grieving a parent last?

6. How long does grief exhaustion last?

7. How long does grief last after death of spouse?

8. How long does dog grief last?

9. How long does it take to stop grieving over a parent?

10. How long can the acute mourning stage of grief last?

These searches come with one implicit question attached: “When will this be over?”

And that question seems to lead to a phrase everyone knows: “stages of grief.” It is more searched than “How to deal with grief” and more than “How long does grief last?” The phrase has moved beyond science and into popular culture. It is known so well now that it is used for everything from political analogies to the breakup of relationships. The Kübler-Ross model, proposed by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, is basically a framework for understanding the emotional and psychological response to grief in five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Top searches about the stages of grief

US, all-time

1. What are the stages of grief?

2. How many stages of grief are there?

3. What is bargaining in grief?

4. What stage of grief am I in?

5. What stage of grief is referred to as the silent stage?

Our searches about the stages of grief seem to suggest we’re looking for simple answers. But sometimes there aren’t simple answers. Experts on grief will tell you that it’s not a linear process, and that’s certainly my experience. You don’t move satisfyingly from one stage to another. I have felt characteristics of several stages all at once and gone back and forth between them. I still do. The National Cancer Institute describes it this way. “In grief, painful feelings come in waves, lessen in intensity and frequency over time, and are often intermixed with positive memories of the deceased.” The searches are incredibly evocative and certainly reflect what I felt. Take the top-searched “Why…” question related to grief: “Why does grief come in waves?”

There is in fact some recent research suggesting that our fixation on the stages is harmful. A study from Frontiers in Psychology published in 2021 found that “inaccurate portrayal of the model may lead to bereaved individuals feeling that they are grieving incorrectly. This may also result in ineffectual support from loved ones and healthcare professionals.”

So our searches are all about bringing meaning to the incomprehensible. If grief brings chaos and turmoil, it’s natural to want to impose a structure on that, to want it to feel controllable and manageable. I think the questions we ask are really all about trying to find that structure and meaning—something we can see around searches for what grief actually is.

These are searches that reflect how unusual the experience of grief is—searching for “grief brain” (because grief does affect how your brain works), or “bureaucratic pain” (because the administrative process of managing a death is so complicated), or “anticipatory grief” (because you just don’t know what is going to happen next).

My oldest friend died a decade ago. Alan was funny, smart, and creative, and one of the wisest people I knew. He gave the best advice too, and when I think of him now it’s in my dreams. Usually I’m doing something dumb and he’s there, in my dream, with an intelligent remark that I should have thought of myself. At some point I will have had a longer relationship with him while asleep than I did when awake.

I thought I was weird, but it turns out that this isn’t what makes me so. Searches for dreams and bereavement consistently show up in the data. Some of these are heartbreaking: “passed away came to hug and kiss me in my dream” is one example, and for a trend like this to show up in the data, it means it’s searched by enough people to be a real phenomenon. In fact, death is the top topic searched with “dreaming about.”

According to a 2023 study, over half of Americans (53%) report being visited in their dreams by someone who has died. It also concluded that a third have “felt the presence” of a dead relative and 28% have told a dead relative about their life. A substantial number of Americans (44%) say it has happened to them in the past year.

“How to cope with grief”

One thing everyone who has been through the grieving process will tell you is how lonely it feels, no matter how much love you are surrounded by. You might know objectively that you are not the first person to have experienced it, but it feels like you’re patient zero. It is raw and personal and incomprehensible. We’re all feeling a collective loneliness already, and then this intense episode happens. And we can see the result in the data, especially if we look at “How to cope with…” searches.

Top “How to cope with…” searches

US, all-time

1. anxiety

2. depression

3. stress

4. loneliness

5. grief

All of these searches speak to the stresses the former US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy referred to in his call for a national conversation about loneliness (see chapter 7)—but they go beyond that. Anxiety, depression, and loneliness can all be related to grief and loss. There are two searches in particular that tell us that directly, and both spiked recently:

- How to cope with grief and loneliness?

- Why is grief so lonely?

The fact that this shows up in the data at all is an irony when you know that for something to show up in Google Trends it has to be searched for by large numbers of people. To search for grief means you’re not really alone, even if it feels that way.

This point gets driven home when we look at grief from the other side. When someone you care about is grieving, the natural inclination is to want to say the right thing, that somehow you will have the magic words that will fix everything, or at least make things feel a little easier. And some of the top searches around grief are about exactly that, because there is no right answer to “What to say to someone grieving?,” or even “What to say to someone who lost a loved one over text?”

A lot of us try to find solace—and help—in the words of others. We search for quotes, poetry, and music to reassure or soothe, or even simply to help a friend feel like they’re not completely alone. “What to write in a sympathy card?” is the top-searched “What to write…” after “What to write in a card?,” for example.

Top searches for poetry or quotes around grief

US, mid-2023–2024

1. Grief is love with nowhere to go

2. What is grief if not love persevering?

3. Grief is the price we pay for love

4. Grief is love

5. Grief is not a sign of weakness

6. Grief is a lonely road

7. How do I live without you?

8. Grief is love’s souvenir

9. Poem for grandma who passed away

10. Tribute to my mother who passed away

Some of these quotes come from recent authors: for example, “Grief is love with nowhere to go” is from blogger Jamie Anderson, “What is grief if not love persevering?” is from the TV show WandaVision, and “Grief is the price we pay for love” is by British psychiatrist Dr. Colin Murray Parkes. These quotes have seeped into the public consciousness enough to become a part of the culture, something we search for when the worst happens. These searches may have a practical purpose—as a passage to read at a funeral, for instance. But they may also be about seeking comfort. A reminder, for you and your loved ones, that you’re not the first person to go through this, nor will you be the last.

Anthony Minghella’s 1990 film Truly, Madly, Deeply is one of the kindest films about grief ever made. In it, the main character Nina wills her dead boyfriend Jamie back to life through the strength of raw emotional loss. Nina is surrounded by people who want to support her, yet she is, in her own words, “like someone who carries her loved one on her shoulder.” I think about Truly, Madly, Deeply all the time, especially when considering what search data tells us about grief.

Since Mum died, I’ve been reminded of this. The data I work with every day supports the idea that my own friends and loved ones have wanted to help and comfort me. It has made things easier for me to realize that while we may be lonely, especially in these extreme moments, the data shows we are not alone.

10

“How can I help?”

The things we care about day to day are changing constantly. Minute by minute, second by second. One moment we are searching for a piece of music we just heard, the next it’s for a TV show recap. A few minutes later, perhaps, it’s for a recipe for dinner, or childcare hours. Then a story about a horrific natural disaster breaks on the news and that is all we can think about. Our attention is both utterly ephemeral and utterly focused at exactly the same time. But when it matters, that is when we search to help.

On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, the US island territory about 1,000 miles southeast of Miami. The effects were devastating: thousands died, and the storm caused billions of dollars’ worth of damage. In the days that followed, “how to help Puerto Rico” and “volunteer to help Puerto Rico” were breakout searches. Puerto Rico was the top-searched place for “donate to.”

Does society exist? If it does, it’s based on helping each other—the simple act of asking for help, and asking how we can help. Maybe that’s why searches for “How to help…” have never been higher than they are right now.

This spike in “help” queries is what made me want to write this book. It is one of the biggest long-term changes we’ve seen in search over time. That line that goes up and to the right represents a rising search interest for something very specific around how we take action: “how to help.”

What is striking about the data is that often the searches are not about helping ourselves, or even our friends, but helping others. Those top searches include “How to help people.” And we see lots of examples of this in moments of disaster. As you may recall from the introduction, after the devastating 2023 wildfire on the Hawaiian island of Maui, the top-trending search on “donation” across all of Google was “Maui fire donation,” and another top search was “How often can you donate plasma?”

Search interest in “How to help others” more than doubled in March 2020, reaching an all-time high; “How to help people” also reached a record high that month. It’s a huge indicator of who we are as human beings.

This desire to help is known as mutual aid, and extensive research shows how these searches reflect a long-standing practice of supporting each other. One piece of research, about the response to the COVID pandemic, showed how people helped each other with three values that underlie the theory of mutual aid: reciprocity (exchange for mutual benefit), shared humanity, and community-driven care, none of which can happen without an active and responsive community. Granted, they were talking about social work, but it seems to me that at least one of those values comes through in search data: shared humanity. We want to help because we can identify with someone who’s going through something. We search for details about a crisis because we can see ourselves suffering in the same way. That is empathy.

During COVID, we viscerally understood we were all in the same situation, notwithstanding the misinformation that flew around during the crisis. During Hurricane Maria or Maui’s wildfires, perhaps we knew someone there, or we could imagine what it would be like to lose everything.

So, how do we ask for help?

“Help me grow”

Let’s just start with the fact that we need help with everything. And we don’t always feel like we want to ask someone to assist us. It’s the contradiction inherent in asking the internet for anything: we may feel like we’re managing it on our own when in fact we are relying on the knowledge and expertise of the millions of others who have asked the same question before, and then offered up the answers they found for strangers.

The top “Help me…” searches in 2023–2024 around the world included searches like “Help me in Spanish” and “Help me write.” There was even the more metaphysical “Help me grow.”

However, a lot of what we ask for is much more specific.

Some of it is about health, of course—“How to help with cramp” or a sore throat or back pain, and sometimes it’s about looking for advice for how to treat more serious conditions. Anxiety, which crops up in this book as often as the character does in the movie Inside Out 2, is a good example of where we can see those with the condition searching for ways to mitigate it, such as therapy.

And sometimes it’s about getting help with the most basic things in our lives.

We noticed that “How to…” searches have increased by more than 140% since 2004, and much of that search interest is directed toward how to “fix” things—whether it’s a light bulb, a window, a washing machine, or even the toilet. In fact, “How to fix…” is consistently near the top of the list of most common queries, year after year, around the world.

So we worked with Xaquín González Veira—formerly of the Guardian, the National Geographic, and the New York Times—to create an online data explorer we called “How to fix a toilet…and other things you couldn’t do without search.”

Xaquín’s take is quirky and idiosyncratic, and I love how he picks up on weird coincidences. For instance, searches of “How to fix a toilet” and “How to use chopsticks” follow a strikingly similar pattern. He puts it this way: “We have become so dependent on offloading, on relieving our brains from keeping certain basic, human information in storage, that we’ve forgotten how to do some fairly basic grown-up tasks…A good chunk of the most-searched ‘How Tos’ sound as if they were asked by someone between 12 and 21 (30 you may even say). They show the terribly sweet, innocent, romantic ignorance of our teens.”

You can see this again and again in Google Trends data. Some of the things we ask are terribly simple. Others make complete sense, because they are tricky and we do need a bit of extra help. “How to write a book” is in there. I’m not sure there’s a good answer to that one. I guess just to get on with it? Although I did decamp with the dog to the California desert to get mine done, so maybe no distractions is another tip. Either way, this is not a question with a simple, right or wrong, answer.

One of the most interesting aspects of the data was how it is different in different countries. In the US we search for how to fix a door more than the global average. (What is it about American doors that makes that the case?) In the UK, almost alone among the rest of the world, it is disproportionately light bulbs and walls. Some countries are united by common household issues: France and South Korea are kindred spirits, it seems, with their troublesome windows.

But when we look at the difference in each country from the global average, the results give a fascinating insight: North Americans and East Asians have issues with their toilets, people in former Soviet countries want to mend their own washing machines, inhabitants of warmer climates are more likely to focus on their refrigerators, and northern and eastern Europeans need help fixing their light bulbs.

Some of these trends, as we’ve seen, are seasonal—for instance, searches asking for how to create a “promposal,” which spike every April, as high-schoolers ask potential dates to their annual prom in more and more imaginative ways. Originally this was a US search that took off after 2013, but then the idea of a prom became more popular in the UK, where you can see it start to spike around 2015. Now promposals are part of life around the world, and teens need help planning them.

You can also see “here today, gone tomorrow” trends, where we need help to make something or do something and will never ask again. My favorite example of this is slime. Yes, slime. It’s a gooey substance of the kind that young children love and you can basically make it with white glue, baking soda, food coloring, and lens cleaner. But why do we care about it? “How to make slime” is actually one of the top-searched questions on Google of all time. It peaked between 2016 and 2019, a mountain that later became a molehill—perhaps related to the fact that “How to get slime out of carpet” became a breakout search at much the same time.

There are lots of examples of these moments in Google Trends. “How to make loom bands” peaked in 2014, and “How to sing the cup song” peaked in 2013 after Anna Kendrick made it famous in the movie Pitch Perfect. Such moments maybe don’t matter a lot individually but they make up a part of our shared memories. My children probably barely remember the few months when they obsessively made loom bands (which explains the tiny elastic bands I still come across in the house even now, years later), but those months make up a tiny part of who they are today.

“How to help someone”

Most common of all is searching for how to support someone you know, where it’s personal. The phrase “help someone” has spiked noticeably in the last few years and is more searched now than ever before. And if we look for the same expression in Spanish, Japanese, French, Portuguese, Hindi…all show spikes in search since 2004.

We want to help “someone” because they are a someone to us.

“How to help someone with depression,” for instance, is one of the top-searched “How to help…” queries. There has also been a consistent rise in search interest for “How to help anxiety,” reflecting the record rates of anxiety in teens in recent years, and “How to help a friend” is up there too.

When we make the data more specific, we can see how we’re trying to find out more about conditions that may be less familiar. The list itself is an interesting mix of adult, baby, and pet. We want to know “How to help an alcoholic” and “How to help a baby poo.” Perhaps we even ask these things on the same day.

Top “How to help someone…” searches

US, all-time

1. with depression

2. with anxiety

3. having a panic attack

4. who is suicidal

5. with PTSD

6. with an eating disorder

7. with schizophrenia

8. with anorexia

9. who is grieving

10. with bipolar

When friends are going through a crisis, what comes through in this data is how we obviously want to be there for them but often do not know where to begin. It is about mutual aid and support, and dealing with huge, life-changing moments when there isn’t a textbook we all learned from as we grew up. Most of us are just winging it, after all, when a friend has lost a loved one or received a cancer diagnosis or is going through a divorce.

“Where to donate”

Every two seconds someone in the US needs blood. One of the most practical ways in which we see this is around offers to donate blood after natural disasters and crises, something that shows up in search as far back as the data goes.

Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Maria, COVID…blood donation patterns follow these crises. Something disastrous happens and we want to do something to help, even when the events are man-made.

The day of Orlando’s Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016, blood donations spiked +1,550% across the US and Orlando was the top metro area searching it. This was not just because people were lined up to give blood to the victims, but also perhaps because gay men were banned from donating blood in the US (a ban that was only lifted in 2023) even after this event, which had such a devastating impact on the LGBTQ+ community.

And if we look at the list of top donation searches since 2004, we can see what the world focused on each year—the “attention economy” in real time. While most of these disasters received global publicity, not all did, but the desire was there to help anyway.

Top-trending donation searches

Worldwide, by year

2004: Boxing Day tsunami, Indian Ocean

2005: Hurricane Katrina, US

2006: Madrid train bombings

2007: Rice*

2008: Sichuan earthquake, China

2009: Australia bushfires

2010: Haiti earthquake

2011: Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Japan

2012: Hurricane Sandy

2013: Typhoon Haiyan

2014: ALS (ice bucket challenge)

2015: Nepal earthquake

2016: US election-related candidates and causes

2017: Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico

2018: Camp Fire, US

2019: Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris

2020: Black Lives Matter

2021: Germany floods

2022: Ukraine

2023: Turkey earthquake

2024: Noto earthquake, Japan

* a billion grains of rice donated to a UN anti-hunger agency thanks to internet game freerice.com

We can see regional variations in this data too. “Donate to Ukraine” was the top-trending donation search of 2022 in the US, but worldwide it was “Ukraine spenden,” which is German for “Ukraine donate.”

Searches around these donations say a lot about us as humans, and the effects of the searches rippled out in many cases, affecting other parts of Google Trends data. For instance, in August 2014, while the ice bucket challenge for those with ALS (MND) was going viral, global searches for “challenge” more than quadrupled, reaching an all-time high. When a disaster does strike, there is plenty of evidence that communities that work together are more likely to bounce back—a phenomenon backed by a Purdue University four-year project that studied Hurricane Sandy and found that communities with strong social connections and support systems recovered faster.

Geographical closeness may be easier to relate to beyond just convenience too. “Soup kitchen” spikes every November, and “where to donate” reached an all-time high in June 2020, suggesting our first priority may be those nearest to us.

Helping others is good for us. I’m not a behavioral psychologist and will try not to butcher a key theory of the field, but it’s called “reciprocal altruism”—the concept that helping others can increase the likelihood of receiving help in return, which benefits individuals in the long run. This theory has a long history in behavioral psychology but was developed primarily by American evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, who wrote a series of papers in which he argued that it has developed as an evolutionary response to increase survival rates and reproductive success.

At one level, the suggestion is that we might bail out a friend because, deep at the back of our minds, we think they will owe us one. Trivers says altruistic behavior, where an individual helps another at a cost to themselves, can evolve even between unrelated individuals, although it’s still a sort of “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” scenario.

It’s not too much of a leap to extend that idea to society as a whole—the notion that there’s good karma to helping others, whether we realize it or not. Which may be why we search for how to volunteer. In fact, “volunteer opportunities” has reached an all-time high in search.

Aside from “volunteer to help,” the top-searched “volunteer to…” is “volunteer to hold babies.” It’s a fascinating insight into an underreported service where volunteers can hold children in neonatal intensive care to support their exhausted parents. Searches for “NICU” and “cuddle” are at a record high. And in May 2022, when “formula shortage” reached an all-time high, so did “donate breast milk.”

There’s some evidence that in recent years people are also looking post-pandemic for more fulfilling careers. “Careers that help people” has always been highly searched and is among the top five “careers that…” of all time, albeit with “careers that pay well” as number one historically. However, we have seen some movement, with “job that helps people” overtaking “job that pays well” in search since 2020.

The top “careers that help people” search is actually for “therapist,” followed by “social worker” and “psychologist,” which may also reflect the fact that searches for “therapy” are now higher than ever before.

“How to be a better person”

There’s another thread that runs through the search data, and it’s exemplified by the top “How to be…” search: “How to be better.” We want to be a better person, a better husband, girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, lover…The data suggests that many of us know we are works in progress, just trying to do our best in the world.

There is good research out there that argues technology has made us less empathetic over time and that we are more isolated because of it. Certainly there is a theme of loneliness that we see often in the data, especially in the post-COVID world. But there is more going on here than that.

In the past, our communities were our families and those we lived with. It’s no secret that globalization, technology, and other social changes have shifted that dynamic. Those who believe in the power of technology might say that communities were “limited” by geography before and that nowadays you can connect with anyone who cares about what you care about at any time, leading to all kinds of weird and wonderful subcultures online.

But that’s not what this book has been about. As I said in the introduction, this is really not a book about the technology itself at all. What it is about is the way we use that technology—those people who have a thought pop into their head as they live their lives.

I have been told many times by many people that a trend in search doesn’t mean very much. So what if this or that was searched more than the other? My response is always the same: it is not nothing. If you care enough to search for something, that has to mean something, even if that care only lasts as long as it takes to say the query.

And what if it does mean something more? Something real and deep and meaningful about who we are as humans?

Maybe you believe the greatest library in history was the Library of Alexandria, housing hundreds of thousands of ancient scrolls. Maybe you believe it’s the British Library in London, home to 170 million items, or the US Library of Congress, the largest library in the world. But what if the modern equivalent of those repositories of human learning is Google Trends? That its data, shifting and changing as it does constantly, tells us more than we can possibly imagine about who we are?

As we struggle to live our lives, raise our kids, stay healthy, and deal with love and grief and loss, what if this data actually shows us something else? That we are all a bit kinder, more generous, and just a little bit more lost than we may have been led to believe.

Terrible things happen in the world every day. But when they do, our response is often the simplest one: to want to help, fix things, and improve the world around us. We don’t get to control the whole universe in our everyday lives, even when we focus on the issues that matter to us. But, day to day, we are how we interact with each other.

And that is the thing that is unique about this data. If you are connected with other Taylor Swift fans, for example, through chat or social media, perhaps you feel part of something bigger than yourself. If you are connected with campaigners for a cause you believe in, you can see the movement around you.

With search it is different. The data is necessarily anonymous. So when you search for “How to boil an egg,” you can’t see if others out there are part of the community of those who don’t know how to boil an egg. But if you take one thing away from this book, make it this: you are not on your own. You are not the only person searching for how to boil an egg—or, say, to comfort a grieving loved one.

When we think of the word “community,” we think of groups of interconnected beings. Maybe we imagine these are people physically located together and bound by a common interest. This data shows that we are part of something else too, no matter how isolated we feel.

And if the internet is the literal expression of Carl Jung’s “collective unconscious,” then isn’t it possible that we are all members of these communities without realizing it?

One of the recurring features of this data is that it allows us to see how various parts of the world differ, but also how they are often the same simultaneously. Who likes pizza? And who likes Chinese food? Or who likes cats and who prefers dogs?

I feel a sense of unity when I see just how much we all have in common, no matter how far apart we may be.

Let’s take Liverpool Football Club. This may date the book, but at the time of writing, Liverpool is champion of the English Premier League and situated in, obviously, Liverpool, in the UK. But did you know that the top city searching for the club is not actually Liverpool? It’s not even in Britain. No, it is the Ugandan city of Kasangati, some 200,000 people living and working 6,500 miles away from the place that gave the club its name. So, we have people thousands of miles apart, united by their love for the beautiful game and the players representing a city in the northwest of England.

And we’ve seen that throughout this book. No matter how much we may fervently believe we are all different, a huge number of us still search for how to make pancakes. We still search for tacos and romantic comedies and parenting advice. And we still search for how to help each other.

These are communities, and we are all part of them.

So when we ask how to be better, this data hints at lots of things that we all feel sometimes. Self-doubt, perhaps. A feeling that we are somehow lacking. Maybe that we are the only ones who don’t know how to do something that everyone else can do. When we search for “How to be a better…,” are we hoping to be the “best” husband, girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, or lover, or maybe just above average? Or just somehow better than we are now? Perhaps sometimes we feel we are the only people on earth who do these things. That we are alone.

But we are never truly alone.

I am proudly part of the communities of people who are looking for obscure Beatles recordings, or information about how to poach an egg without it getting all stringy, or how to calm a dog on a trip to the vet, or how to find Crunchie chocolate bars in San Francisco (that last one admittedly is probably quite a small group). And sometimes I am part of the community that asks about how to be a better dad or partner.

When I explore this data at work, the number of times I look at it and say to myself “Oh, I do that” still shocks me.

We are humans, after all. We’re not perfect, but we really do have more in common than we may think. Yes, life can sometimes be confusing, exhausting, exhilarating—but often all we are looking for is a way to face our challenges, and overcome them. Together.

Appendix

What is Google Trends data?

Taken from the official Google Trends FAQ, https://support.google.com/trends/answer/4365533

Google Trends provides access to a largely unfiltered sample of actual search requests made to Google. It’s anonymized (no one is personally identified), categorized (determining the topic for a search query), and aggregated (grouped together). This allows us to display interest in a particular topic from around the globe or down to city-level geography.

What samples are provided?

There are two samples of Google Trends data that can be accessed. Real-time data is a sample covering the last seven days. Non-real-time data is a separate sample from real-time data and goes as far back as 2004 and up to seventy-two hours before your search.

How is a sample of searches representative?

While only a sample of Google searches are used in Google Trends, this is sufficient because we handle billions of searches per day. Providing access to the entire dataset would be too large to process quickly. By sampling data, we can look at a dataset representative of all Google searches, while finding insights that can be processed within minutes of an event happening in the real world.

How is Google Trends data normalized?

Google Trends normalizes search data to make comparisons between terms easier. Search results are normalized to the time and location of a query by the following process.

Each data point is divided by the total searches of the geography and time range it represents to compare relative popularity. Otherwise, places with the most search volume would always be ranked highest.

The resulting numbers are then scaled on a range of 0 to 100 based on a topic’s proportion to all searches on all topics.

Different regions that show the same search interest for a term don’t always have the same total search volumes.

What searches are included in Google Trends?

Google Trends data reflects searches people make on Google every day, but it can also reflect irregular search activity, such as automated searches or queries that may be associated with attempts to spam our search results.

While we have mechanisms in place to detect and filter irregular activity, these searches may be retained in Google Trends as a security measure: filtering them from Google Trends would help those issuing such queries to understand we’ve identified them. This would then make it harder to keep such activity filtered out from other Google search products where high-fidelity search data is critical. Given this, those relying on Google Trends data should understand that it’s not a perfect mirror of search activity.

Google Trends does filter out some types of searches, such as:

Searches made by very few people: Google Trends only shows data for popular terms, so search terms with low volume appear as “0.”

Duplicate searches: Google Trends eliminates repeated searches from the same person over a short period of time.

Special characters: Google Trends filters out queries with apostrophes and other special characters.

Is Google Trends the same as polling data?

Google Trends is not a scientific poll and shouldn’t be confused with polling data. It merely reflects the search interest in particular topics. A spike in a particular topic does not reflect that a topic is somehow “popular” or “winning,” only that for some unspecified reason there appear to be many users performing a search about a topic. Google Trends data should always be considered as one data point among others before drawing conclusions.

How does Google Trends differ from Autocomplete?

Autocomplete is a feature within Google search designed to make it faster to complete searches that you’re beginning to type. The predictions come from real searches that happen on Google and show common and trending ones relevant to the characters that are entered and also related to your location and previous searches.

Unlike Google Trends, Autocomplete is subject to Google’s removal policies as well as algorithmic filtering designed to try to catch policy-violating predictions and not show them. Because of this, Autocomplete should not be taken as always reflecting the most popular search terms related to a topic.

How does Google Trends differ from AdWords search data?

The AdWords search-terms report is meant for insights into monthly and average search volumes, specifically for advertisers, while Google Trends is designed to dig further into more granular data in real time.

Acknowledgments

This book started life in a field in northern California, six months after my mother died. I had been putting it off and there I was, the evening before my son’s mountain bike race, at least an hour from the nearest town, unable to sleep. So I started to write. This was where the grief chapter of this book began, navigating how to process something that seemed unprocessable.

And the only reason it began at all was because of the patient and thoughtful nudging of my literary agent, Jeff Shreve, who helped me see that this was about more than just data and actually about who we are.

Turns out that writing a book requires an army of friends and experts to help make it happen at all, and thanks must go to my data family. Alberto Cairo, for all the advice on how to start a book, encouragement, and long conversations about what we do all day. The same goes for Scott Klein, the nicest man in data journalism, and Jer Thorp, for making the connections that started the train rolling.

Additional research for this book (and some of the most fun insights) was done by Katie Seaton.

When Nigel Holmes said he would illustrate, I knew it would happen. His work is so delightful, it has made compiling this book a lot of fun. There is a joy to Nigel’s work that emanates through his art to the reader.

I learned that creative people make books happen in the first place and often don’t get the credit they deserve at all, which is where Alex Christofi and Jill Schwartzman come in, with their care and enthusiasm for telling this story.

Thanks must also go to those who gave their advice and wise counsel, in particular Mike Nutley, Bill Weil, Heather McCulloch, and Sheryl Cattell. This book is better because they read it and suggested changes.

Thanks to those at Google who realized that search data is something to be made transparent, not to be hidden. Hal Varian and Yossi Matias made Google Trends a reality and a tool that is one of the most important data access websites in the world today. It would also not have happened without the creative engineering team in Tel Aviv, led when this book was written by Nir Kalush and Omri Weisman and supported by too many to name here.

Particular thanks must also go to Googlers Marvin Chow, Rebecca Michael, Michele Slack, K. K. Walker, Kem Haffner, and Engel Yue for the encouragement and support to tell these stories. And to Steve Grove and Olivia Ma for giving me the chance to build a job where it didn’t exist in the first place.

Much of the data in this book comes directly from the tireless work of the Google Trends data team, which I have been lucky to lead for the past decade. They produce content and insights every day about the things that matter. In particular, Annanya Raghavan, Jenny Lee, Keila Guimarães, and Margaret Lucas, each of whom will recognize some of their many insights here.

They are supported by a group of former journalists, analysts, and coders working on the Google Trends data team over the past ten years, too many to name here but each of whom has left an indelible imprint on how this most important of datasets is understood and used.

Adrian Holovaty might not know it, but he started this journey into data storytelling for me when he visited the Guardian newsroom in 2010 and showed us just what could be done with public local city-crime-rates data. Every day I appreciate those editors who let me pursue it from the newsdesk and start a website (while they knew I was plainly lying about how much time it would take): Alan Rusbridger, Emily Bell, Paul Johnson, Katharine Viner, Janine Gibson, and Ian Katz. Not to mention the patience and creativity of the Guardian graphics team, led then by Michael Robinson, whose words of wisdom about clarity in datavisuals stay with me today.

There are also some others I should have liked to share this with, but the universe had other ideas.

Alan Cronshaw, who would have appreciated some of the jokes and who made the sky a little less blue when he left us too soon.

My father-in-law, John Ramrayka, for whom family meant everything. He left Guyana at the age of seventeen to discover the world with a fierce curiosity that inspires his children and grandchildren—and me.

Our mum, Janet Rogers, who would have said it was all brilliant, even if it wasn’t—and told everyone she met to buy it.

None of this would have gotten anywhere without my partner in everything, Liza, who always believed I could do it when I didn’t myself—thank you for all the reading, editing, and encouragement. And to Ella and Jake, the funniest, most creative, and kindest people I know, smarter than me in every possible way. I am so proud of you three.

I was lucky enough to grow up in a family that was never short of support or love, and my dad, Mike Rogers, is indirectly responsible for all the musician quotes here. He taught me the value of music (and to play the harmonica), and how to take a breath amid the craziness. My brother, Jon Rogers, inspires me every day with his generosity, creativity, and kindness.

I learned everything I really needed to learn about visual storytelling from author and illustrator Richard Scarry, who once said: “I’m not interested in creating a book that is read once and then placed on the shelf and forgotten” and taught me that telling stories has to be accessible, accurate, and fun. I grew up with his stories read to me by my grandmother Enid, and those illustrations gave me a generous view of the world, where people work and live together to support each other (and also ride in giant ships that you could see inside and understand how they work).

Today our visual world changes so fast, it can make us forget those who told data stories before. And data storytelling goes back much further than many people realize. The very first Manchester Guardian, on May 5, 1821, contained a table of data, a list of schools in Manchester and Salford, showing how many pupils attended each one and average annual spending. It was the first time such a list had ever been published, and it was with a noble aim. As the (anonymous) reporter wrote: “At all times such information it contains is valuable; because without knowing…the best opinions which can be formed of the condition and future progress of society must be necessarily incorrect.”

In other words, without knowing where we are, nothing can ever improve. This is data+power—a way to make society fairer and work for everyone. And pioneers like John Snow, Florence Nightingale, William Playfair, Emma Willard, and Charles Joseph Minard shaped data visualization through a desire to make the whole world better.

Today I am excited by those who are creating new ways of telling those stories, inspired by the past but hopeful for the future. Some of them are credited in this book, but if you haven’t seen their work, please take time to. You won’t be sorry to explore how Nadieh Bremer, Shirley Wu, Federica Fragapane, and my friend Wes Grubbs see things.

And to my secondary school math teacher, who wrote the following in my end-of-year report: “TRIES HARD BUT HAS LITTLE NATURAL ABILITY.” If data is about anything, it is about understanding our lives just a little bit better, and explaining this constant mystery to us. It took me a long while to lose my fear of numbers, to get that understanding that it is not really just about equations and sums and division, which is something I never learned in the classroom.

And this data, in particular, belongs to all of us.

Notes

Introduction: When we ask for help

Google Knowledge Graph: Sullivan, Danny, “About Knowledge Graph and Knowledge Panels,” Google, May 20, 2020, https://blog.google/products/search/about-knowledge-graph-and-knowledge-panels/.

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predict movements in the economy: Varian, H. (2023), “Nowcasting with Google Trends,” Economic Record, 99:1–12, https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-4932.12783.

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Google Trends to predict economic variables: Woloszko, N. (2020), “Tracking activity in real time with Google Trends,” OECD Economics Department Working Papers, No. 1634, Paris: OECD Publishing, https://doi.org/10.1787/6b9c7518-en.

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industrial activity, and economic uncertainty: “Tracking GDP growth in real time,” OECD ARCHIVE (n.d.), https://web-archive.oecd.org/sections/weekly-tracker-of-gdp-growth/index.htm.

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Since 1998, the way we search has transformed: “How Search Works,” Google search, Google, https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/our-history/, accessed January 7, 2025.

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having shot down seven aircraft: Stanton William Bunting, The Aerodrome (n.d.), https://www.theaerodrome.com/aces/england/bunting.php.

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About five million Britons served in the First World War: Bailey, R. E., Hatton, T. J., and Inwood, K. (December 21, 2022), “Surviving the Deluge: British Servicemen in World War I,” Economics & Human Biology, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X22001125#:~:text=About%206%20million%20men%20served,or%20in%20the%20Territorial%20Force.

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another three million in the Second World War: “The Fallen,” Olympic Britain, UK Parliament, 2012, https://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/research/olympic-britain/crime-and-defence/the-fallen/.

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shell shock cases treated in the First World War: “Shell Shock Cases,” National Archives, nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/medicine-on-the-western-front-part-two/shell-shock-cases/, accessed May 21, 2025.

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strength of 46,000 by 1918: “History and Learning Briefings—Farnborough Air Sciences Trust” (n.d.), https://airsciences.org.uk/FAST_Briefings_08_RoyalFlyingCorps.pdf.

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according to the Office for National Statistics: “Population of the United Kingdom by Country of Birth and Nationality: Underlying Data Sheets,” Office for National Statistics, https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/datasets/populationoftheunitedkingdombycountryofbirthandnationalityunderlyingdatasheets.

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3% of the population of England and Wales is mixed-race: “Ethnic group, England and Wales: Census 2021,” Office for National Statistics, October 27, 2022, https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/ethnicity/bulletins/ethnicgroupenglandandwales/census2021.

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green cards in the US: Office of Homeland Security Strategy, “Lawful Permanent Residents: 2013,” Department of Homeland Security, December 2023, https://ohss.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2023-12/Lawful_Permanent_Residents_2013.pdf.

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those who have been missed: Bureau, U. C. (August 19, 2024), “Design and methodology report,” Census.gov, https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/methodology/design-and-methodology.html.

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1: “Why am I so tired?”

“database of intentions”: John Battelle, “The Database of Intentions,” John Battelle’s Search Blog, November 2003, https://battellemedia.com/archives/2003/11/the_database_of_intentions.

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we never seem to have enough of: Whillans, A. V., Weidman, A. C., and Dunn, E. W. (2016), “Time, Money, and Happiness: How do people spend their time when they trade time for money or money for time?,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 7, no. 3, 213–222.

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unmoored from the rest of the world: Greene, Graham, The Tenth Man (London: The Bodley Head, 1985).

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increased over the past two decades: “Advice for People with Fatigue During the Heatwave,” Royal College of Occupational Therapists, accessed November 29, 2024, https://www.rcot.co.uk/news/advice-people-fatigue-during-heatwave [inactive].

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particularly at night: Climate Central, “Sweltering Summer Nights,” Climate Matters, June 27, 2023, https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-matters/sweltering-summer-nights-2023.

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romantic partners to cuddle up with: “Cuffing Season,” Merriam-Webster, accessed December 15, 2024, https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/cuffing-season-meaning-origin.

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weekend lie-ins: “Sociolinguistics,” Azerbaijan International 6, no. 4 (Winter 1998), https://www.azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/92_folder/92_articles/92_sociolinguistics.html.

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don’t get enough of it: “Sleep Duration” (October 26, 2023), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), https://www.cdc.gov/sleep/data-research/facts-stats/adults-sleep-facts-and-stats.html, accessed December 16, 2024.

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less likely to get good sleep: Kurina, Lianne, et al., “Loneliness Is Associated with Sleep Fragmentation in a Communal Society,” Sleep 34, no. 11 (2011): 1519–1523, accessed December 15, 2024, https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article-abstract/34/11/1519/2454670.

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dream searches to find the answers: Fragapane, Federica, “The Shape of Dreams,” accessed December 1, 2024, https://the-shape-of-dreams.com/.

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“time perspectives”: Jankowski, K. S., Zajenkowski, M., and Stolarski, M. (2020), “What are the optimal levels of time perspectives? Deviation from the balanced time perspective-revisited (DBTP-r),” Psychiatry Research, 290, 113–117.

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“if a stubborn one”: Rovelli, Carlo, “The Grand Illusion,” Lapham’s Quarterly, accessed December 15, 2024, https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/time/grand-illusion.

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time travel dramas in recent years: Knapp, Alex, “Chinese Censors Halt Production of Time Travel Dramas,” Forbes, April 10, 2011, https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/04/10/chinese-censors-halt-production-of-time-travel-dramas/.

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2: “How to ask politely”

study by the European Commission: Special Eurobarometer 529, “Europeans and Their Languages,” May 2024, European Commission.

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actually more rational: Abutalebi, J., Della Rosa, P. A., Green, D. W., Hernandez, M., Scifo, P., Keim, R…. , and Costa, A. (2015), “Bilingualism tunes the anterior cingulate cortex for conflict monitoring,” Cerebral Cortex 25, no. 1, 239–246.

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“Beautiful in English”: Bremer, Nadieh, “Beautiful in English,” http://www.beautifulinenglish.com/.

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depending on who you believe: “What is the origin of the phrase ‘two nations divided by a common language’?,” https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/74737/what-is-the-origin-of-the-phrase-two-nations-divided-by-a-common-language.

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other than English at home: “Languages We Speak in the United States,” United States Census Bureau, December 14, 2022, https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/12/languages-we-speak-in-united-states.html.

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10,000 speakers each: Census of India, https://censusindia.gov.in/.

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3.5% to 3.7% since 2008: U.S. Census Bureau, https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST1Y2022.S1810?q=vision&t=Disability.

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Charles Duhigg’s book Supercommunicators: Duhigg, Charles, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection (New York: Random House, 2024).

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“risk of crime, civil unrest, terrorism, and kidnapping”: U.S. Department of State, https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-travel/International-Travel-Country-Information-Pages/Niger.html.

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The 1944 film Gaslight is the origin: Gaslight, directed by George Cukor, starring Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, Joseph Cotten, and Angela Lansbury (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1944).

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New Yorker article by Kathryn Schulz: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/29/the-lost-giant-of-american-literature.

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than older generations: “2023 American Values Survey,” Public Religion Research Institute, October 2023, https://www.prri.org/research/threats-to-american-democracy-ahead-of-an-unprecedented-presidential-election/.

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“the history of creation”: Adams, Douglas, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (London: Pan Books, 1979).

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Tilburg University in the Netherlands: Kaye, Linda, Malone, Stephanie, and Wall, Helen, “Emojis as Social Information in Digital Communication,” Computers in Human Behavior 122 (September 2021): 106824.

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platform content moderation: Killender, Kimberley, “Algospeak: How TikTok Is Changing the Way We Talk,” Willow & Blake, May 17, 2023, https://www.tiktok.com/@4thandwillow/video/7390796973294619946.

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3: “How to boil an egg”

My Life in France: Child, Julia, with Alex Prud’homme, My Life in France (New York: Knopf, 2006), 22.

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depending on evidence: “Dietary Guidelines for Americans: Home,” U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, DietaryGuidelines.gov, accessed December 17, 2024, https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/.

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young people there: Sedghi, Sarra, “How Bootleg Fast Food Conquered Iran,” Gastro Obscura, March 29, 2018, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/fast-food-in-iran.

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50% of the world’s vanilla: Workman, Daniel, “Top Vanilla Exports & Imports by Country + Average Prices,” World’s Top Exports, accessed December 17, 2024, worldstopexports.com/top-vanilla-exports-imports-by-country-plus-average-prices.

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“A little cheesy pineapple one, Tone?”: Leigh, Mike, Abigail’s Party (London: Methuen Drama, 1982).

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food industry body: Eat at Home: The 2023 National Frozen & Refrigerated Foods Consumer Trend Report, National Frozen & Refrigerated Foods Association, https://interactive.4media-group.com/nfra-eat-at-home-report-2023.

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cost of food in 2022 and 2023: Vypr, How Brits Are Cooking at Home in 2024, https://vyprclients.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Ebook-How-Are-Brits-Cooking-from-Home-in-2024.pdf.

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of cereal fame: Bellis, Mary, “A Brief History of Peanut Butter,” Smithsonian Magazine, August 7, 2023, retrieved from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/brief-history-peanut-butter-180976525/.

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coffee machines in recent years: “Coffee Machine Market Size, Share & Trend Analysis Report by Product Type (Drip/Filter, Pod/Capsule, Espresso, Bean-to-Cup), by Application (Commercial, Residential), by Region, and Segment Forecasts, 2023–2030,” Grand View Research (2023), retrieved from https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/coffee-machine-market.

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“transformed in recent times”: Alexander, Adam, The Seed Detective: Uncovering the Secret Histories of Remarkable Vegetables (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2022).

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record sales for organic food: “U.S. Organic Market Breaks Through $70 Billion Mark in 2023,” OTA, May 11, 2023, ota.com/news/press-releases/23183 [inactive], accessed December 18, 2024.

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This is another example of Hal Varian’s Trends “nowcasting”: Choi, H., and Varian, H. (2012), “Predicting the Present with Google Trends,” Economic Record, 88(s1), https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/J.1475-4932.2012.00809.X.

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Refugee and Immigrant Transitions: Between Meals, Refugee and Immigrant Transitions, reftrans.org/cookbook-project/ [inactive], accessed December 18, 2024.

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4: “Why is my poo green?”

called Flu Trends: “The Next Chapter for Flu Trends,” Google Research (March 19, 2015), https://research.google/blog/the-next-chapter-for-flu-trends/.

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one in every twenty Google searches is for health-related information: “A remedy for your health-related questions: Health info in the Knowledge Graph,” Google Keyword Blog, February 10, 2015, https://blog.google/products/search/health-info-knowledge-graph/.

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leafy green vegetables: “Green poop: What stool color can indicate about health,” https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/green-poop-what-stool-color-can-indicate-about-health.

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tourists to Jamaica suffer from: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC Yellow Book 2024: Health Information for International Travel, chapter 3, Itineraries, Jamaica, retrieved from https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/yellowbook/2024/itineraries/jamaica.

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Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD): “OECD Skills Outlook 2023: Skills for a Resilient Green and Digital Transition,” Paris: OECD Publishing, https://doi.org/10.1787/27452f29-en.

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twelve years of health-related searches: Gianordoli, Gabriel, “Visualizing Health,” Medium, October 3, 2017, https://medium.com/@gianordoli/visualizing-health-bb36c600a8e4.

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Axios, reporting on the research: “The seasons when people freak out about health issues,” Axios (n.d.), https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/the-seasons-when-people-freak-out-about-health-issues-1513305609.

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searches show no sign of going down: “U.S.: Why do consumers turn their backs on gym memberships?,” YouGov (n.d.), https://business.yougov.com/content/49804-us-why-do-consumers-turn-their-backs-on-gym-memberships.

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the gym in the country: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=gym%20nicaragua.

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graded as “not free” by Freedom House: “Nicaragua: Country Profile,” Freedom House, https://freedomhouse.org/country/nicaragua.

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effective as an antidepressant: Verhoeven, J. E., Han, L. K. M., Lever van Milligen, B. A., Hu, M. X., Révész, D., Hoogendoorn, A. W., Batelaan, N. M., van Schaik, D. J. F., van Balkom, A. J. L. M., van Oppen, P., and Penninx, B. W. J. H., “Antidepressants or running therapy: Comparing effects on mental and physical health in patients with depression and anxiety disorders,” Journal of Affective Disorders, May 15, 2023, 329:19–29, doi: 10.1016/j.jad.2023.02.064, Epub February 23, 2023, PMID: 36828150.

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The resulting visual exploration: “Searching Covid-19,” https://searchingcovid19.com/.

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since 2004 of 14.8%: CPS Home: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/cps/.

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compared to before the pandemic: McBain, R. K., Cantor, J., Pera, M. F., Breslau, J., Bravata, D. M., and Whaley, C. M., “Mental Health Service Utilization Rates Among Commercially Insured Adults in the U.S. During the First Year of the COVID-19 Pandemic,” JAMA Health Forum, 2023; 4(1):e224936, doi:10.1001/jamahealthforum.2022.4936.

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a big increase from previous datasets: “Public opinions and social trends, Great Britain: Personal well-being and loneliness,” Office for National Statistics (December 20, 2024), https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/datasets/publicopinionsandsocialtrendsgreatbritainpersonalwellbeingandloneliness.

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Americans feeling increasingly anxious: “American adults express increasing anxiousness in annual poll; stress and sleep are key factors,” Psychiatry.org (May 1, 2024), https://www.psychiatry.org/news-room/news-releases/annual-poll-adults-express-increasing-anxiousness.

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5: “Why does my dog eat grass?”

1. followed by cats at 32.1%: https://www.avma.org/resources-tools/reports-statistics/us-pet-ownership-statistics.

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2. In Russia, cats are preferred to dogs as pets: “Russians About Keeping Pets,” Levada Center, February 21, 2024, accessed November 20, 2024, https://www.levada.ru/en/2024/02/21/russians-about-keeping-pets/.

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3. a symbolic part in the narrative: Ralphs, E. E., The Cat in Russian Literature and Folklore (Edinburgh: Charles Skilton, 1984).

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4. more people own dogs than cats: https://tgmresearch.com/pet-care-survey-results-in-tunisia.html#:~:text=Which%20pet%20breeds%20are%20the,pet%20owners%20in%20the%20country.

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5. picking up on their social cues: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982205000928.

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6. when dogs see a happy human, they respond to it: Guo, K., Meints, K., Hall, C., Mills, D. S., and Carré, J. (2016), “Dogs can discriminate between human emotions,” Current Biology 26, no. 1, 101–105.

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7. the most complete project to catalog dog vs cat searches ever produced anywhere: Bremer, Nadieh, “Why Do Cats and Dogs…?,” Visual Cinnamon, accessed November 27, 2024, whydocatsanddogs.com.

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8. wrote Nadieh: https://www.visualcinnamon.com/2019/04/designing-google-cats-and-dogs/.

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9. Togo, Ghana, and Benin: Bale, Rachael (May 26, 2020), “Prized as pets, are ball pythons being traded out of wild existence?,” Mongabay, https://news.mongabay.com/2020/05/prized-as-pets-are-ball-pythons-being-traded-out-of-wild-existence/.

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10. “He knew me. Therefore he cannot be replaced”: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/08/vs-naipaul-lessons-on-life-literature-and-being-left-alone#:~:text=by%20Perry%20Ogden.-,Sir%20V.%20S.,Did%20he%20die%20quickly?%E2%80%9D.

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11. “eating habits, playing less, and increased clinginess”: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016815912400203X.

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6: “How does gravity work?”

1. can impact your prospects in life: “OECD Skills Outlook 2023: Skills for a Resilient Green and Digital Transition,” Paris: OECD Publishing, https://doi.org/10.1787/27452f29-en.

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2. discovered at the University of Manchester in 2004: “Discovery of Graphene,” University of Manchester (accessed from https://www.graphene.manchester.ac.uk/learn/discovery-of-graphene/).

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3. deeply rooted in our biology: Ohman, A., and Mineka, S., “Fears, phobias, and preparedness: Toward an evolved module of fear and fear learning,” Psychological Review, July 2001;108(3):483–522, doi: 10.1037/0033-295x.108.3.483, PMID: 11488376.

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4. blue skies are associated with calmness and tranquility: Valdez, P., and Mehrabian, A. (1994), “Effects of color on emotions,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 123, no. 4, 394. This study explores the link between colors and emotions, including the association of blue with calmness and tranquility.

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5. Electric Light Orchestra’s “Mr. Blue Sky”: Electric Light Orchestra, “Mr. Blue Sky,” from Out of the Blue (Jet Records, 1977).

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6. the opening lines of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Adams, Douglas, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (London: Pan Books, 1979), 1.

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7. celebrate our scientific achievements: Sagan, Carl, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (New York: Random House, 1994).

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8. as philosopher Guy Kahane puts it: Kahane, G., “Our Cosmic Insignificance,” Nous, December 1, 2014;48(4):745–772, doi: 10.1111/nous.12030. PMID: 25729095; PMCID: PMC4340547.

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9. “it is very nearly empty”: Kahane, “Our Cosmic Insignificance.”

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10. said one neuroscience expert: Jha, A., Rutherford, A., and Rogers, S., “I’ve seen things…,” Guardian, August 26, 2004, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2004/aug/26/sciencefictionspecial.

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7: “What does love feel like?”

The Parent Trap: The Parent Trap, directed by Nancy Meyers (Walt Disney Pictures, 1998).

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“epidemic of loneliness and isolation”: “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community [Internet],” Office of the Surgeon General (OSG), Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2023–, PMID: 37792968.

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“Love is real”: Lennon, John, “Love,” from John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (Apple Records, 1970).

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for individuals and society: Putnam, Robert D., Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000).

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the 1971 film The Go-Between: The Go-Between, directed by Joseph Losey (EMI Films, 1971).

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between both lovers and friends: Al Arashi, Y., “A lost legacy? Yemen and its language of love,” GQ Magazine (May 25, 2022), https://www.gqmiddleeast.com/culture/yemen-men-love-language [inactive].

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we might not like to admit but it’s real: Dion, K., Berscheid, E., and Walster, E. (1972), “What is beautiful is good,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 24, no. 3, 285–290, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0033731.

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saying they have used a dating site or app: Anderson, Monica, et al., “Key Findings About Online Dating in the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, February 2, 2023, www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/02/02/key-findings-about-online-dating-in-the-u-s/.

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willingness to tackle taboos: Mangan, L., “A brief history of agony aunts,” Guardian, November 13, 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/nov/13/agony-aunts.

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feminist Carol Hanisch in 1970: Hanisch, Carol, “The Personal Is Political,” from Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation, edited by Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt (1970), www.carolhanisch.org/Chwritings/PIP.html, accessed December 31, 2024.

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chilling out around gay marriage: Ingraham, C., “Google searches show the dramatic change in how America feels about gay marriage,” Washington Post, September 10, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/10/google-searches-show-the-dramatic-change-in-how-america-feels-about-gay-marriage/.

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quitting smoking or regular exercise: Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., and Layton, J. B. (2010), “Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review,” PLOS Medicine 7, no. 7, e1000316.

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divorce will happen in roughly half of marriages: “Marriage and Divorce,” United States Census Bureau, October 24, 2024, www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/10/marriage-and-divorce.html.

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almost any other major US city: Arnett, David, “Tulsa 2nd in Most Divorced Adults,” Tulsa Today, June 8, 2022, www.tulsatoday.com/2022/06/08/tulsa-2nd-most-divorced-adults/.

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“grow old along with me! The best is yet to be”: Browning, Robert, “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” in The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, Vol. 2 (Smith, Elder, 1863), 149–154.

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8: “Why do toddlers bite?”

Google Trends data: “Health, United States,” National Center for Health Statistics, Hyattsville, MD, available from: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/hus/data-finder.htm.

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starting to be relaxed: Klein, Alyson, “Forever Changed: A Timeline of How COVID Upended Schools,” Education Week, April 2022, https://www.edweek.org/leadership/forever-changed-a-timeline-of-how-covid-upended-schools/2022/04.

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help their kids: “Family Internet Use Post-Pandemic: A Survey,” Morgan Stanley (2021), https://www.morganstanley.com/articles/family-internet-use-survey.

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$330,000 in the US: O’Shea, Claire, “How Much Does It Cost to Raise a Child?” U.S. News & World Report, December 4, 2024, money. usnews.com/money/personal-finance/articles/how-much-does-it-cost-to-raise-a-child.

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£223,000 in the UK: “Starting a family? The eye-watering costs of having a baby,” The Times, www.thetimes.co.uk/money-mentor/income-budgeting/family-finance/starting-family-baby-costs [inactive], accessed January 1, 2025.

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2.53 children per household: “Average Household Size by State 2024,” World Population Review, https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/average-household-size-by-state.

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compared to twenty-one in 1970: Merten, P., “Here’s how the average childbirth age has changed over time,” Northwell Health (July 30, 2024), https://www.northwell.edu/news/the-latest/geriatric-pregnancy-increases-complication-rate.

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thirty-five and older: “Pregnancy at Age 35 Years or Older,” American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Obstetric Care Consensus (August 2022), https://www.acog.org/clinical/clinical-guidance/obstetric-care-consensus/articles/2022/08/pregnancy-at-age-35-years-or-older.

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than in previous years: Sacinti, K. G., Kalafat, E., Sukur, Y. E., and Koc, A., “Increased incidence of first-trimester miscarriage during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Ultrasound in Obstetrics & Gynecology, June 2021;57(6):1013–1014, doi: 10.1002/uog.23655, PMID: 33880806, PMCID: PMC8251237.

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illegal in New Zealand: “Baby names that are illegal around the world,” actionnews5.com, https://www.actionnews5.com/2022/06/08/baby-names-that-are-illegal-around-world/.

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still a thing, apparently: “People call baby’s name an ‘abomination’—but mum hits back and says ‘it’s not the devil,’ ” Mirror, April 27, 2023, www.mirror.co.uk/lifestyle/family/people-call-babys-name-abomination-32997935, accessed January 1, 2025.

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unable to communicate: “Young Children and Biting,” Cleveland Clinic, health.clevelandclinic.org/young-children-and-biting, accessed January 1, 2025.

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teenagers in recent years: “Data and Research,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, March 27, 2023, www.cdc.gov/autism/data-research/index.html, accessed January 1, 2025.

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Tiger Mother was published: Chua, Amy, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (Penguin Books, 2011).

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internet safety: Brooks, Mindy, “How we’re helping kids and families safely learn, grow and play online,” The Keyword, December 19, 2022, blog.google/technology/families/how-were-helping-kids-and-families-safely-learn-grow-and-play-online/.

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books for children: Rogers, Simon, The Kids Are All Bright: Infographics for All Ages, March 5, 2014, simonrogers.net/2014/03/05/the-kids-are-all-bright-infographics-for-all-ages/.

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One study compared children: Vasu, E. S., and Howe, A. C. (1989), “The effect of visual and verbal modes of presentation on children’s retention of images and words,” Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 26: 401–407, https://doi.org/10.1002/tea.3660260505.

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younger members of the family: Hooper, Lisa, “Parentification” (2011), 10.1007/978-1-4419-1695-2_169.

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Nearly a quarter of all adults in the US: Lei, L., Leggett, A. N., and Maust, D. T., “A national profile of sandwich generation caregivers providing care to both older adults and children,” Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 2023;71(3):799–809, doi:10.1111/jgs.18138.

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adults affected in the UK: “In a pickle: UK’s estimated 6 million ‘sandwich generation’ workers need better employer support,” Unum UK (June 28, 2022), https://www.unum.co.uk/about-us/media/in-a-pickle-uk-sandwich-generation [inactive].

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“over 60 years of age than men”: “Indonesia Country Diagnostic Study: Long-Term Care,” Asian Development Bank (2021), https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/751251/indonesia-country-diagnostic-study-long-term-care.pdf.

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such as the US: Eastman, M. R., Kalesnikava, V. A., and Mezuk, B., “Experiences of care coordination among older adults in the United States: Evidence from the Health and Retirement Study,” Patient Education and Counseling, July 2022;105(7):2429–2435, doi: 10.1016/j.pec.2022.03.015, Epub March 17, 2022, PMID: 35331572, PMCID: PMC9203919.

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9: “Why is grief so lonely?”

“can’t be cheered out of”: Devine, Megan, It’s OK That You’re Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand (Sounds True, 2017).

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“sanctioned, or publicly mourned”: Doka, Kenneth J., Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow (Lexington Books, 1989).

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“nothing is certain except death and taxes”: “Benjamin Franklin’s Last Great Quote and the Constitution,” Constitution Center, October 26, 2023, https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/benjamin-franklins-last-great-quote-and-the-constitution.

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1.1 million of them in the US: “COVID-19 Map,” Coronavirus Resource Center, Johns Hopkins University, https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

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went down by nearly two years: “Fertility Google Trends in the United States, 2017–2022: Data from the National Vital Statistics System,” National Center for Health Statistics, Data Brief No. 427, December 2023, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db427.htm.

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bargaining, depression, and acceptance: Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth, On Death and Dying (New York: Macmillan, 1969).

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“positive memories of the deceased”: Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on Evaluating Pain in Health Care Settings, Prevention, and Treatment, Relieving Pain in America: A Blueprint for Transforming Prevention, Care, Education, and Research, Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2011, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK66052/.

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“healthcare professionals”: Ramanathan, Kalyanaraman, Agarwal, Anupam, and Khanna, Ashish K., “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) Infection in Pregnancy: Critical Care Considerations,” Anesthesia and Analgesia 133, no. 5 (November 2021): 1298–1306, https://doi.org/10.1213/ANE.0000000000005711.

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someone who has died: “Many Americans Report Interacting with Dead Relatives in Dreams or Other Ways,” Pew Research Center, August 23, 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/23/many-americans-report-interacting-with-dead-relatives-in-dreams-or-other-ways/.

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a national conversation about loneliness: “New Surgeon General Advisory Raises Alarm About Devastating Impact of Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation in the United States,” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services news release, May 3, 2023, https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2023/05/03/new-surgeon-general-advisory-raises-alarm-about-devastating-impact-epidemic-loneliness-isolation-united-states.html.

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Dr. Colin Murray Parkes: Parkes, Colin Murray, Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life (New York: International Universities Press, 1972).

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10: “How can I help?”

an active and responsive community: Littman, D. M., et al. (2022), “Values and Beliefs Underlying Mutual Aid: An Exploration of Collective Care During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research 13, no. 1, 89–113, https://doi.org/10.1086/716884.

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during the crisis: Pennycook, G., McPhetres, J., Zhang, Y., Lu, J. G., and Rand, D. G. (2020), “Fighting COVID-19 misinformation on social media: Experimental evidence for a scalable accuracy-nudge intervention,” Psychological Science 31, no. 7, 770–780.

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Inside Out 2: Inside Out 2, directed by Kelsey Mann (Walt Disney Pictures, 2024).

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“How to fix a toilet…”: González Veira, Xaquín, “How to fix a toilet…and other things you couldn’t do without search,” http://how-to-fix-a-toilet.com/, accessed January 2, 2025.

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lens cleaner: “How to Make Slime—the Home Depot,” The Home Depot, December 7, 2023, https://www.homedepot.com/c/ah/how-to-make-slime/9ba683603be9fa5395fab901e60f5405.

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teens in recent years: “Data and Research,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, March 27, 2023, www.cdc.gov/autism/data-research/index.html, accessed January 1, 2025.

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someone in the US needs blood: “Facts about blood supply in the U.S.,” American Red Cross (n.d.), retrieved January 1, 2025 from https://www.redcrossblood.org/donate-blood/how-to-donate/how-blood-donations-help/blood-needs-blood-supply.html.

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freerice.com: “Billion grains of rice donated to UN anti-hunger agency thanks to internet game,” United Nations (November 9, 2007), https://news.un.org/en/story/2007/11/239092.

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support systems recovered faster: Aldrich, Daniel P., “A Little Help from Your Friends Is Key to Natural Disaster Recovery, Purdue Research Study Suggests,” Purdue University News Service, October 29, 2018, https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/archive/releases/2018/Q4/a-little-help-from-your-friends-is-key-to-natural-disaster-recovery,-purdue-research-study-suggests.html.

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reproductive success: Trivers, Robert (1971), “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,” Quarterly Review of Biology 46, no. 1, 35–57, https://doi.org/ 10.1086/406755.

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more isolated because of it: Turkle, Sherry, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Basic Books, 2011).

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“collective unconscious”: Abdunnur, Sharif, “The Internet Is the Collective Unconscious,” IAI, November 21, 2023, https://iai.tv/articles/the-internet-is-the-collective-unconscious-auid-2793.

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Acknowledgments

1. a table of data: “The First Guardian Data Journalism: May 5, 1821,” Guardian, September 26, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/sep/26/data-journalism-guardian.

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Index

The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of the book. Each link will take you to the beginning of the corresponding print page. You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the corresponding reference on your e-reader.

# A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

#

- 10 Things I Hate About You (film), 149

- 1437 (slang), 55

- 2D materials, 126, 128

- 27 Dresses (film), 149

- 3-day diet, 82

- 50 First Dates (film), 149

A

Abigail’s Party (play, pineapple), 67

acne, 92

Adele (artist), 29, 148

adultery (see also relationships), 163

advice column, 155

Alabama, 34, 96

alcohol, 73, 91, 92, 100, 101

Alfredo sauce, 77

algospeak, 57

allergy, 92

almond milk, 76

almond mom, 180

ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), 93, 218, 219

altruism, reciprocal, 219

American Community Survey, 44

American English (see also divided by a common language), 43

American Psychiatric Association, 102

amusement park, 28

Anderson, Jamie, 203

animals, 33, 46, 106–23, 135

animals (dreams), 33

anorexia, 104, 215

anti-inflammatory diet, 82

anxiety, see Chapters 1–10

anxious attachment, 144

Aperol spritz, 28

apologies, 46

Arabic, 33, 38–9, 151

Argentina, 43, 195

Aristotle, 183

Arizona, 79, 80

art classes, online, 182

astronaut, 141–2

astronomy, 131–2, 135–42

Atkins diet, 82

attachment parenting, 180

aurora australis, 138

aurora borealis, 138

Australia bushfires, 217

authoritative parenting, 180

autism, 95, 179, 178

Autocomplete, 230

avocado, 65, 70

Azerbaijan (see also sleep), 31

B

babies, 4, 18, 87, 166–79, 215, 220

back pain, 29, 88, 91, 208

back to school, 72

backpack, bulletproof (see also parenting, grief), 183

baking soda, 213

ball python, 119

banana, 87, 90

banana bread, 76–7

bargaining (stage of grief), 188, 197

baseball, 21, 193

bathing suits, 92

Battelle, John, 21

beauty, 27, 42, 47

bedbugs, 134–5

bed risers, 28

bees, how to help (see Englishness), 6

Belarus, 131

Belgium, 43

belly buttons, 113

Bernard Shaw, George, 42

betta fish, 120–1

Beyoncé, 173

BFFR (slang), 54–5

Bible, 189

Big Bang, 136

bipolar, 215

Biscuit (family dog—see also cats vs dogs, ticks, pet adoption), 106–7, 112, 114

biting (child, parenting), 177, 186

Black Friday, 12

black hole, 131–2

Black Lives Matter, 218

Blade Runner (film), 140

bleach, 100

blockchain, 53–4

blood donation, 216–8

blood pressure, 87, 88, 90, 95

blood sugar, 123

board game, 28

book, how to write, 210, 211

boredom, 181

boxing classes, 182

Boxing Day tsunami, 217

Bradshaw, Carrie (TV and film character), 148

bread, 69, 84, 85

breast cancer awareness month, 93

breast reduction/augmentation, 95

breast self-examination, 93

breastfeeding, 91

Bremer, Nadieh, 40, 114–6

British Library, 222

bronchitis, 89, 92

Browning, Robert (poet), 164–5

brunch, 30

buffet, 80

burrito, breakfast, 30

burrito, cotton candy, 85

burrito, how to fold, 78

bus schedule, 30

business, 45

butt (see also dead butt), 94

butter, 65, 69

butter sculpture, 28

C

Cabbage Soup diet, 82

cadeau, 50

caffeine, 97

cake icing, 45

calendar: the day in search, 29

calendar: the year in search, 27

California, 45, 46, 70, 79, 80, 132, 157, 211

calm down, how to, 30, 31

camels, 33

Camp Fire, 218

camping, 28

cancer, 92, 93, 197, 216

candy salad, 85

canker sores, 95

Cantonese, 39

capybara, 119

carbon (element), 128, 130

card games, 101

cardiac surgery, 95

Carnivore diet, 82

casserole, 73

cat purr, 113–4

cats (see also pets, cucumbers, and Christmas trees), 108–16, 118, 120–3, 224

CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), 32, 90, 192

cell biology, 28

census, 17, 18

chai tea, 97

chaos, 46, 198

cheat (see also relationships), 163

cheese, 61, 117

cheesecake, 59

Chekhov, Anton, 110

Cher (artist), 26

cherries, 117

cherry blossom, 28

chicken, 50, 70, 72, 76–8, 84, 120, 121

chickenpox, 92

chicken salad, 77

Child, Julia (chef), 62, 67

children (see biting)

chili recipe, 77

Chinese (language), 38, 151

Chinese food, 76–8, 80, 224

Chinese New Year, 52

chocolate, 37, 59, 61, 69, 85, 225

chocolate chip cookie, 76–7

chocolate muffins, 74

cholesterol, 88

Christmas, 12, 34, 68, 71

Christmas trees (see also cats), 116

Chua, Amy, 180

cigarette (see also divided by a common language), 43

CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species), 119

climate change, 11

clinginess (cats), 122

clothes, 46, 100

Clueless (film), 149

coding classes, 182

coffee, 27, 31, 96, 173

coffee machines, 73

cold (illness), 92–3, 100, 162

Colombia, 29, 212

comfort food, 28, 72, 74, 76

commitment issues (see also relationships), 153, 162

communication, 55–7

community, 27, 71, 145, 207, 217, 223–5

compost, 28

compound (chemistry), 130, 135

confidence intervals, 17

contractions (pregnancy), 170

cooking, 18, 59–77, 184

co-parenting, 183

corduroy, 45

coronavirus (COVID-19), 68, 79–80, 83, 90, 92, 97–103, 108, 126, 133, 144, 155, 167, 192–3, 195, 207, 216, 221

cosmic insignificance, 136, 139

cottage cheese flatbread, 85

cotton candy burrito, 85

covalent bonds, 128

craft ideas, 28

cramps, 208

cranberry, 73

crochet, 182

crock pot recipes, 76–7

crying, 91, 112, 121–2, 173–4, 177, 195

crying in sleep, 177

cucumber (see also cats), 65, 116

cuffing season, 29, 152

cultural trends, 29

curiosity, 5, 107, 118, 124, 133, 176

curse word 45

Cyrano de Bergerac (play), 45–7

D

daddy (issues), 164

daddy longlegs, 135

Dash diet, 82

dating, 108, 145, 154

dating app, 154

dating prompts, 154

daylight saving time, 25–6

dead butt (exercises), 94

death, 91, 95, 120–2, 183–4, 188–9, 191–204

Delaware, 45

deluge, 11, 73

demure, 51

denial (grief stage), 197

Denmark, 62

Denver Nuggets, 25

depression, 5, 96, 103–4, 164, 197–8, 201–2, 214–5

detox, 92

devious emoji, 58

diabetes, 92

diabetic, 69

diarrhea (see also poo), 88, 90, 91, 95

Die Hard (film), 27, 28

diet, 64, 71, 81–92

diet, changing, 64, 77, 84–5

diet, Mediterranean, 82

diet, South Beach, 77, 82

digital watches, 136

dinosaurs, 12, 136

disaster, 205, 207, 216–9

discovery, 131, 138

disenfranchised grief, 190–1

divided by a common language, 42–3

divorce, 162–4, 183–4, 216

DNA, 126, 129

dog adoption, 107–9

dog grief, 121–2, 196

dog, calm in a storm, 1–2, 117

dogs, 1–2, 69, 100, 101, 106–18, 121–3, 150, 196, 200, 209, 211, 224, 225

do it yourself, 69

Doka, Kenneth, 190–1

donation, 6, 83, 207, 216–20

doors, how to fix, 211–2

Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 110

doughnuts, 65, 79

dragonflies, 134

dreams, vii, 32–3, 114, 122, 142, 199–200

dry skin, 28

due date, 169

Duhigg, Charles, 47

E

earth, 129, 131, 136, 138–9

earth sciences, 131

easiest recipes, 71

Easy A (film), 149

eating disorder, 104, 215

economic collapse, 7

economic forecasting, 8

economic uncertainty, 9

egg salad, 28, 72

eggless chocolate cake, 59

eggs, 19, 50, 61, 63–5, 72, 223–5

Egypt, 212

Einstein, Albert, 34

Electric Light Orchestra, the, 133

electric toothbrush, 28

electricity, 126, 129

electrons, 129, 130

element (chemistry), 127, 130

elevator (lift), 42

emoji, 55–8

emoticons, 55–6

emotional support animal (see also pets), 112

empathy, 4, 140–1, 207, 221

engagement party, 155

engagement rings, 155

English, 6

English Premier League, 224

escape room (see also first date), 154

ESL classes, 40

espresso, 73

etiquette, 51, 182

Europe, 37–8, 110, 131, 132, 187

European Commission, 38

evolutionary psychology, 129

exercise, 28, 46, 88, 93, 94, 96, 108, 159

existential, 31, 162

exoplanets, 138

eyes hurt (see also solar eclipse), 104–5

F

face mask, 98

feces (see poo), 89

family history, 14

family portrait, 18

family-based care, 185

fast food, 30, 66, 80

fat (food), 64, 81, 96

fatigue, 27

feline (see also cats), 116, 122

feminist, 156

fencing (sport), 57

fevers, 177

fie (slang), 52

film cameraman, 15

firefly, 137

first date ideas (see also dating, escape room), 154

fix everything, how to, 202

flower, 28

flu (see also influenza), 87, 92

fluffy yogurt, 85

FML (slang), 54

FODMAP, 82

FOMO (slang), 55

food, 27, 28, 30, 59–85, 89, 92, 96, 100, 117, 180, 224

food bank, 83–4

food coloring, 213

food industry, 68

food influencers, 68

food stamps, 83

Forgetting Sarah Marshall (film), 149

foster care (animals), 106, 109

Fourth of July, 117

fox (animal), 33, 110, 119

France, 14, 62, 126, 211–2

Franklin, Benjamin, 191

French (language), 37, 39–40, 150–1, 214

French Polynesia, 119

French toast, 77

friend, 28, 41–2, 53, 144–8, 159–61

friend zone, 147

fruit flies, 135

fruit picking, 28

FTW (slang), 54

full moon, 135–7

FYP (slang), 55

G

G20 country, 9

garlic, 33

Gaslight (film), 52

gas station, 30

gaslighting, 51–2

gastro-community, 71

gekyume (slang), 53

Gemini AI, 150

gender-neutral pronouns, 55

generosity, 187, 223

geographical limits, 3

Georgia, 79, 117

geriatric pregnancy, 170

German (language), 40–1, 151

ghost hunting, 28

gift-giving, 49–50

gifted child, 179

girl names, 172

global consciousness, 19

global warming, 131–2

globalization, 67, 151, 222

glossary, 20

gluteal amnesia, 94

gluten, 61, 64–5, 97

gnats, 134

Golden Greek tortoises, 120

GOLO diet, 82

Google Knowledge Graph, 7

Google search, 4, 7, 9, 11, 22, 63, 87, 160, 179, 227–30

gout, 95

graduation, 28

grams in an ounce, 12, 61

Grant, Cary (actor), 148

grapefruit diet, 82

grapes, 117

graphene, 128

gravity, 126

gravy, 73

green (see also poo), 88–90

Green, Al (see also heartbreak), 164

green beer, 72

greenhouse gas emissions, 136

grief, 18, 120–2, 144, 187–204, 223

grief brain, 198–9

grief, entitlement to, 190

ground beef, 70

guacamole, 77

Guatemala, 44, 152, 194

guitar, 39, 187, 210

gummy bear mom, 180

H

Halloween costumes, 159

hamster, 120–1

hangover, 28

Hanisch, Carol, 156

Hanukkah, 46, 71

happy hour, 30

Hawaii, 6, 79, 138, 207

health, 18, 32, 68, 71, 86–105, 208

health literacy, 91

health statistics, 87

heartbreak, 122, 146, 162, 164

heated outdoor seating, 80

hemorrhoids, 95

He’s Just Not That Into You (film), 149

hiccups, 88, 90, 174

Hindi, 214

Hitch (film), 149

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The (book), 56, 136

holiday rentals, 4

holistic lifestyle, 180

homeless shelter, 30

horse, 108, 120–1

hospital, 86, 117

hotels, 30

housing, 9

How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (film), 149

human interaction (see also loneliness), 164

humanity, 3, 5, 16, 18, 172, 185, 207

humorous situations, 150

Hurricane Harvey, 1

Hurricane Helene, 117

Hurricane Katrina, 117, 216–7

Hurricane Maria, 205, 208, 216, 218

Hurricane Rita, 216

hydrological research, 50

I

- ibf (slang), 53

- ice bucket challenge (see ALS), 93, 218

- ice cream, 30, 69, 79

- ice cream pancakes, 85

- ice skating, 154

- ick, the (see also relationships), 153

- igloos (restaurants), 81

- iguanas, 33, 120

- Illinois, 79

- immigration, 76

- incel (slang), 53

- Indian (cuisine), 61, 77–9

- Indian Ocean, 217

- Indonesian (language), 38

- industrial activity, 9

- infant sleep training, 30, 176, 179

- influenza (see also flu), 91, 100

- ingredients, 46, 64, 69, 70, 76, 85

- insomnia, 4, 28, 88, 91

- insulated water bottle, 28

- Interstellar (film), 141

- intimate relationship, 160

- intuitive understanding, 183

- Italian (cuisine), 76–8

- Italian (language), 40–1, 151

- IYKYK (slang), 55

J

- Jake Paul vs Tommy Fury, 25

- Jamaica, 63, 90, 200

- James Webb space telescope, 132

- Japanese (cuisine), 78

- Japanese (language), 13, 39, 40–2, 150–1, 214

- jealous, 46

- jit (slang), 53

- job fair, 28

- job opening, 4

- job that helps people, 220–1

- jobless claims, 8

- Juneteenth, 52

- Just Go With It (film), 149

K

- Kahane, Guy, 136, 139

- kale, 75

- Kardashian, Kim, 173

- Kasangati, Uganda, 224

- Katy (name), 45

- Kelley, William Melvin, 53

- Kellogg, John Harvey, 73

- Kentucky, 72, 96

- Kerrville, Texas, 105

- keto diet, 82

- kidney stones, 95

- kindness, 44, 53

- kissing, 12, 18, 146–8, 199

- knee replacement, 95

- kneecaps (babies), 176

- Knocked Up (film), 149

- koala parenting, 179

- Kondo, Marie, 79

- Korean (cuisine), 77–8

- Korean (language), 38, 151

- Kübler-Ross model (see also grief), 196

- Kwanzaa, 71

L

- labor markets, 9

- language, 8, 13, 19, 32–3, 37–58, 89, 91, 99, 108, 134, 150–1

- lava, 138

- Lebron, Jools (TikToker), 51

- lei (money), 28

- Lennon, John (artist), 19, 144

- lens cleaner, 213

- life expectancy, 192

- lift (elevator), 42

- light bulbs, 211

- Lincoln, Abraham (US President), 7

- literature, Russian, 110

- Liverpool FC, 224

- LLNL (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), 132

- lobster tail, 76

- LOL (slang), 54

- London, drunk, 24

- loneliness, 30–2, 144, 164, 201–2, 221

- loom bands, 214

- Louisiana, 1, 45, 96

- love you, how to say, 39, 44, 150–1

- low carb recipes, 76–7

- low fat food, 81, 96

- low sugar food, 81

- lower Puna eruption, 138

- LPs (vinyl), 100–1

- lunch, 28, 30

- lunch ideas, 72

- lust (see also relationships), 150

- LWKY (slang), 54–5

M

mac and cheese, 73

Macao, 78

machine learning, 9

Madagascar, 66

magnesium, 97, 102

Maina, Fadji, 50

Maine, 79, 104

malawah (Somalian flatbread), 84

Maltipoo, 106

mammography, 93

mango, 117

mango gummies, 85

map: cats vs dogs, 111

map: eye pain (solar eclipse), 105

map: love, 152

map: misspelled words in America, 46

margarita, 77, 85

Mars, Bruno, 148

Marvel Cinematic Universe, 140, 167

mashed potatoes, 73

Masters egg salad, 72

Masters Golf Tournament, 72

matcha, 97

mathematics, 131

Matias, Yossi, 7

Maui wildfire, 6, 207–8

Mayo Clinic diet, 82

McDonald’s, 66, 80

meatloaf, 76, 77

medical knowledge, 86

Medicare, 91

meditation, 30

Megaloblatta longipennis (cockroach, lewd), 127

meme, 13

mental health, 91, 101, 103

metaphor, 45

meteor, 137

Mexican cuisine, 76–78, 80

Mexico, 78, 94, 104–5

Miami, 205

Michelin Guide, 80

Military diet, 82

milk, 50, 61, 76, 96, 181, 220

mint julep (cocktail), 72

miscarriage, 171–2

miscommunication, 150

misinformation, 207

Mississippi, 46, 96

Mobile, Alabama, 34

Mongolia, 78

monkey, 118–9

monoclonal antibody, 132

morning routine, 30–1

movies, 15, 27, 34–5, 47, 139–41, 144, 145, 148–9, 208, 214

“Mr. Blue Sky” (song, the Electric Light Orchestra), 133

mukbang (slang), 53

mulled wine, 74

Murthy, Vivek, 144, 201–2

music, vii, 19, 20, 30, 81, 202, 205

mutual aid, 207, 215

Meyers, Nancy (director), 143

N

- Naipaul, V. S., 120

- Namibia, 48

- NASA, 50, 131, 138

- National Cancer Institute, 197

- natural disaster, 6–7, 29, 117, 205, 216–8

- neonatal intensive care (NICU), 220

- nepo baby, 170, 173

- Nevada, 79, 80

- New Hampshire, 45

- New Mexico, 79

- new moon, 137

- New York (state), 45,

- Niger (country), 49–50

- nonbinary, 53

- nonverbal communication, 57

- Norris, Chuck (actor, meme), 12–13

- No Strings Attached (film), 149

- Noto earthquake, 218

- nuclear fusion, 132

O

- OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), 8, 9, 90–1, 125, 130

- Oakland University, Michigan, 122

- Oklahoma, 45, 163, 168

- old age, 164

- old-fashioned (cocktail), 74

- older adults, 185

- Olympics, 29, 74, 94

- online dating, 145, 154

- OOTD (slang), 54

- opinion, 46

- organic food, 83

- O’Shaughnessy, Arthur, vii

- otter, 118–9, 153

- ovulation, 170

- owl, 119

- oxygen, 127

P

pain (illness), 4, 29, 88, 91–2, 95

pancakes, 12, 16, 60–2, 77, 85, 225

panda, 118–9

pandemic (see also coronavirus), 1, 68, 72, 80, 83, 87, 97–8, 100, 101, 103, 108–9, 171, 192, 207, 220

panettone, 73

panic attack, 5, 104, 215

Parkes, Colin Murray, 203

parkour classes, 182

parrot, 121

peach, 28, 117

peanut butter, 65, 71, 73

Pele’s hair (natural phenomenon), 138

penguins, 112–3

peppermint milkshake, 28

Perseids, 137

personality, 46

pet adoption (see also Biscuit), 107–9

pet-friendly hurricane shelters, 117

pet ownership (see Biscuit), 106

Philippines, 35, 43, 46, 90

phone friend, 161

physical exercise, 28, 46, 88, 93, 94, 96, 108, 159

physics, 34, 131

physique, 45–6

piano, 27–8

pickles, 85, 117

pie, 73

pink moon, 137

pistachio chocolate, 85

pizza, 30, 66, 69, 72, 79–80, 224

planet, 128, 135–6, 138–9

plant-based, 82

plasma donation, 6, 207

plastic surgery, 94–5

play friend, 161

playground, 30

Pluto, 135

pneumonia, 89

poetry, 145, 202–3

Poland, 41, 62, 84, 131

polarization, 6

politeness (see also Niger), 48

political instability, 49

polling data, 229

poo (feces), 88–90, 115–6, 215

poo, color of (see also green), 88–90

poo, emoji, 115

popular culture, 148, 196

popcorn, 65

pork, 70, 78–9

porn star martini, 67

Portuguese (language), 33, 40–1, 214

potatoes, 63, 70, 73

power tools, 101

preeclampsia, 171

pregnancy, 91, 169–73, 176

pregnancy test, 169

Pretty Woman (film), 148, 149

primitive (humans), 136

prom, 211–3

promposal, 211, 213

pronouns, 55

propane, 101

Proposal, The (film), 149

proposal (marriage), 28

Public Religion Research Institute, 55

Pulse nightclub shooting, 217

Purdue University, 219

Putnam, Robert D., 145

Q

- qualitative data, 17

- quantitative data, 17

- quinoa, 65, 71, 75–6

- quit drinking, 96

- quit smoking, 28, 30, 96

- quit vaping, 96

R

- rabbit, 121

- raccoon, 118–9

- race (talking to children about), 183

- recipes, 4, 27, 28, 30, 59, 61, 67–71, 74, 76–7, 84, 92, 205

- reciprocity, 207

- refrigerators, 211

- Refugee and Immigrant Transitions (charity), 84

- refugees, 84

- relationships, 33, 48, 143–65

- relativity, 34, 141

- reservations (restaurants), 30

- rice, 63–5, 69–70, 97, 155, 217–8

- rizz (slang), 52

- rng (random number generator), 53

- road trip, 28

- roller skates (see also COVID-19), 100

- romantic comedy, 148–50

- Rostand, Edmond, 45

- RSV (in babies), 170

- run clubs, 96

- running in groups (see also therapy), 96

- Russell, Rosalind (actor), 148

- Russian (language), 38, 40–1, 151

S

same-sex marriage, 156–8

sandwich generation, 184–5

saturated fats, 64

schizophrenia, 104, 215

school shooting (see also grief), 183, 193–4

Schulz, Kathryn, 53

science, 124–42, 161, 196

science fiction, 139–42

scientific method, 125

sedentary lifestyle, 94

self-preservation, 117

selfie (slang), 53

Serbia, 25

Serendipity (film), 149

sex (gender of baby), 172

Sex and the City (see also Carrie Bradshaw), 148–9

sharks, 113

She’s All That (film), 149

shingles, 89

sign language, 38, 44, 151

sinus (infections), 89

situationship, 154

skibidi (slang), 52

skin care (rashes), 92

slang, 8, 52–3

sleep, 4, 24, 30–4, 97, 101–3, 113, 116, 166, 173, 174, 176, 177, 179, 199

sleep gummies, 102

sleep regression, 179

slime (how to make), 12, 16, 213

slime (how to remove from carpet), 213

sloth (animal), 119

SMH (slang), 51, 54

smuggling, 118

snakes, 33, 113, 116, 119, 129

snakes, biting, 33, 129

snoring, 88, 89, 101

social media, 3, 55, 57, 68, 90, 94, 133, 138, 173, 223

social worker, 220

softball, 28

solar eclipse (see also eyes hurt), 104–5, 127, 137

solar storms, 138

solar system, 128, 139

solstice, 27

“Someone Like You” (Adele song), 29

sorry, how to say, 39

soup, 27, 28, 77, 79, 82, 84

soup kitchen, 219

soy milk, 76

Spanish, (language), 33, 39–41, 150–1, 208, 214

special characters, 229

spider’s web, 182

spiders, 135

spikes in search, 20

sports, 30, 181

spring forward, 26

Squid Game (compared to rain), 11

squirrel, 46, 118–9, 134

standard time, 25

standards test, 154

star (astronomy), 127–8, 135

Star Wars (film), 139–40

STEM friend, 161

strep throat, 89

stress, 14, 103, 144, 201

stuffing (food), 73

Sudan, language, 38–9

sun, telling time with, 24

sunscreen, 28, 91

surfaces (COVID-19), 100

Surgeon General, 144, 201

survey, 8, 17, 44, 91

sustainability, 136

sweat (dogs), 113

sympathy card, 202–3

Syria, 25, 152

T

taco, 78, 225

Taiwan, 35, 56, 78, 82

take care of kids (see also sandwich generation), 184

take care of parents (see also sandwich generation), 184

takeaway (takeout) food, 79

taxes, 4, 45, 155, 191–2

taxi, 30

TBH (slang), 54

tea (see divided by a common language), 42–3, 97

team building, 28

teenagers, 139, 143, 178, 188, 209, 213, 214

teething, 175, 177

television (TV), 11, 24, 30, 48, 69, 74, 87, 154, 187, 193, 203, 205

temperature, 26, 30

tequila (see also COVID-19), 101

Terminator Genisys (film), 35

Texas, 1, 2, 45, 79, 104–5, 193

TFW (slang), 54

Thailand, 26, 78, 152

Thanksgiving, 68, 71, 73, 77, 83

The Bear (TV show), 74

The Hallmark Channel, 28

therapist, 195, 220

therapy, 178, 208, 221

There’s Something About Mary (film), 149

thinking, 3, 27, 59, 127, 183, 185

THOT (slang), 54

ticks (see also Biscuit), 28, 91, 107

tie (neckwear), 12–13, 210

tie-dye, 28

Tilburg University, Netherlands, 57

time, 22–7, 33–6

time change (clocks), 22, 25–6

time of day, 29

time perspectives, 33–4

time, slow (see also Mobile, Alabama), 34

time travel, 34–5

toilet, 209, 211

toilet paper, 100

tolerance, 55

Tolstoy, Leo, 110

tomato, 64–5

tortoise (life expectancy), 120–1

tourism, 9, 76, 90, 94

trade (economics), 9, 119

traditional dishes, 74, 78

trauma, 193

traveler’s diarrhea, 90

trending, 20

Trivers, Robert, 219

trunk (car boot, see also divided by a common language), 43

trust, 150, 164

tumbling classes, adult, 94

Turkey (country), 25, 218

turkey (food), 64, 73

Turkish (language), 40

turntable, 28

twenty-first century, 7, 18–19,

Typhoon Haiyan, 218

U

- Ukraine war, 25, 40, 103, 218

- Ukrainian (language), 38, 40, 84

- unconditional love, 106, 145

- unconscious, 46, 224

- Underwood, Carrie, 173

- unemployment, 8, 99

- unexpected gifts and Niger, 49–51

- universal translator, 56

- universe, 19, 124, 128, 136, 139, 180, 223

- unknown truths, 2

- urgent care, 30–1

- US Supreme Court, 40, 156

- Utah, 169

- UTI (urinary tract infection), 95

- uwu (slang), 53

V

- vacation/holiday, 4, 9, 21–2, 30, 41

- vaccines, 92, 126, 133

- Valentine’s Day, 27, 72, 159

- vanilla, 66

- Varian, Hal, 7, 21, 84

- veganism, 82

- vegetarianism, 82, 77

- Veira, Xaquín González, 209

- vertigo, 95

- viral trends, 51, 127, 219

- virtual reality, 141

- visual storytelling, 234

- volunteering, 83, 206, 220

W

- wages, 84

- walls, 211–2

- WandaVision (TV show), grief, 203

- war, 7, 14–16, 25, 52

- wardrobe storage, 101

- washing machines, 209–211

- wasp mom, 180

- water, 43, 61, 113, 135

- watermelon, 28

- weather, 1, 9–11, 22, 27, 29, 30, 49, 60

- weather report, 9

- wedding, 155–6, 162

- wedding bands, 156

- wedding planners, 162

- weight loss, 96

- Welles, Orson, 15–16

- West Virginia, 96

- When Harry Met Sally…(film), 149

- white noise (see also sleep), 102

- Wilde, Oscar, 42

- Wimbledon, 72

- windows (house, how to fix), 211–2

- wine, 74

- woke (slang), 53

- wolf, 118–9

- word games, 187

- World War I, 14, 16, 25

- World War II, 16, 52

- WYD (slang), 54

- Wyoming, 45

X

- X-rays, 131

Y

- Yemen, 150, 152

- yoga, 29

- YOLO (slang), 54

- young (age), 14, 15, 53, 66, 125–6, 176, 178, 184, 213

Z

- zaddy (slang), 53

# A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Appendix: Image Description

The following image in this ebook illustrates complex ideas or contains a passage of text. Here it has been reproduced as a thumbnail and accompanied by an extended description.

Top “How to spell . . .” searches by state – 2004

This is a rectangular, stylized map of the United States showing the most common “How to spell …” Google search term for each state in 2004. Each state is filled with a light shade and labeled with a single word or short phrase representing a commonly misspelled word in that state. Alaska and Hawaii are shown in simplified insets at the lower left.

Pacific insets

- In the far lower left corner, a small, simplified outline labeled “Squirrel” represents Alaska.

- Slightly to the right of Alaska’s inset, a small cluster of shapes representing Hawaii is labeled “Philippines.”

Pacific Coast of the contiguous United States

- Washington is labeled “Hanukkah.”

- Oregon, is labeled “Opinion.”

- California is labeled “Pretty.”

Western interior states

- Idaho is labeled “Strawberries.”

- Nevada is labeled “Internet.”

- Montana is labeled “Privilege.”

- Wyoming is labeled Corduroy.

- Utah is labeled “Mississippi.”

- Arizona is labeled “Colonel.”

- New Mexico is labeled “Quiet.”

- Colorado is labeled “Ingredients.”

Central northern states

- North Dakota is labeled “Secret.”

- South Dakota is labeled “Beautiful.”

- Nebraska is labeled “California.”

- Kansas is labeled “Chaos.”

Central southern and midwestern states

- Oklahoma is labeled “Animal.”

- Texas is labeled “Physique.”

- Louisiana is labeled “Decision.”

- Arkansas is labeled “Exercise.”

- Missouri is labeled “Unconscious.”

- Iowa is labeled “Grandma.”

- Minnesota is labeled “Clothes.”

- Wisconsin is labeled “Cousin.”

- Illinois is labeled “Picture.”

- Michigan is labeled “Cousin.”

- Indiana is labeled “Jealous.”

- Ohio is labeled “Equal.”

- Kentucky is labeled “Definitely.”

- Tennessee is labeled “Field.”

Southern states

- Mississippi is labeled “Nervous.”

- Alabama is labeled “Personality.”

- Georgia is labeled “Surprise.”

- Florida is labeled “Language.”

Mid-Atlantic and central eastern states

- West Virginia is labeled “Because.”

- Virginia is labeled “Said.”

- North Carolina is labeled “Said.”

- South Carolina is labeled “Principal.”

- Washington, D.C. is labeled “Interesting.”

- Maryland is labeled “Pennsylvania.”

- Delaware is labeled “Business.”

- Pennsylvania is labeled “Mountain.”

- New Jersey is labeled “Experience.”

Northeastern states

- New York is labeled “Aesthetic.”

- Connecticut is labeled “Monster.”

- Rhode Island is labeled “Effectively.”

- Massachusetts is labeled “Elephant.”

- Vermont is labeled “Apologies.”

- New Hampshire is labeled “Tortured.”

- Maine is labeled “Heard.”

Back to image in Chapter 2: “How to ask politely.”

About the Author

Simon Rogers has been Google’s data editor for a decade, leading a team of data journalists, analysts, and visualizers to tell stories with data. Previously data editor at The Guardian and Twitter, he is an award-winning data journalist, receiving the Royal Statistical Society’s award for statistical excellence in journalism, and has been named “Best UK Internet Journalist” by the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford.

Simon is also the author of Facts Are Sacred, as well as a series of infographics books for children (spanning the human body, space, technology, and the animal kingdom).

He teaches data journalism at Medill-Northwestern University in San Francisco and is cohost of The Data Journalism Podcast.

Despite being based in San Francisco with his family, Simon is possibly the most English person you will ever meet.

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