What We Ask Google: A Surprisingly Hopeful History of Humankind

Simon Rogers occupies a uniquely privileged vantage point. As Google’s Data Editor, leading a team of data journalists, analysts, and visualisers tasked with telling stories from Google’s data, he has access to something no anthropologist, psychologist, or sociologist has ever possessed: an unfiltered record of what human beings actually want to know, stripped of social performance and self-censorship. What We Ask Google explores the world’s biggest dataset – an epic snapshot, two decades long and counting, of our collective brain. The quest the book sets out to answer is deceptively simple: when people are given the chance to ask anything, what do they actually ask?

Rogers is, first and foremost, a gifted data journalist, and the book’s greatest strength is its readability. The first thing readers notice is his admirable ability to write a book filled with data, facts, and figures that is enjoyable to read. This is no small feat. Where lesser writers would drown in spreadsheets and trend lines, Rogers keeps the material light, energetic, and often genuinely surprising.

The most compelling sections are those that reveal patterns hiding in plain sight. He identifies cyclical patterns, like the swelling cookbook searches every December, as well as larger social trends, like how “low calorie” supplanted “low fat” in 2013, and how Covid and the Ukraine war coincided with increased searches on anxiety. These moments of datadriven illumination are where Rogers is at his most persuasive, showing how collective behaviour leaves a kind of digital sediment that, over time, tells a story no individual could. The cross-cultural comparisons are similarly compelling. Rogers examines national differences that may speak volumes, such as the fact that Europeans search out science topics more than inhabitants of any other continent, with Belarus leading in astronomy and global warming taking second place in general science overall. And the book’s emotional
centrepiece – the observation that around the world, at 2 a.m., parents are all searching for how to get their babies to sleep – is a quietly profound reminder of our shared humanity beneath surface-level differences.

The book’s central thesis is that search data reveals humanity to be more curious, more compassionate, and more community-minded than our public discourse would suggest. Rogers takes hope in the fact that “the data strongly contradicts the idea that human beings are only interested in looking after themselves.” Natural disasters are a case in point – where searches consistently pivot from understanding the threat to finding ways to help. He notes that careers “that help people” have been more popular in searches than those “that pay well” since 2020, and that during disasters, searches always evolve from aLempts to understand the threat to attempts to proactively navigate it.

This is a genuinely affecting argument, and Rogers marshals it well. His conclusion – that “we are all a bit kinder, more generous and just a little bit more lost than we may have been led to believe” – lands with warmth and sincerity.

Yet here lies the book’s central tension, and its most significant flaw: Rogers is, ultimately, a Google employee writing a book about Google’s data, and this creates an interpretive bias that becomes increasingly difficult to ignore. Publishers Weekly described the book as “a rose-coloured reflection on commonly googled questions,” noting that Rogers sometimes seems to misread questions – for instance, framing “how often can I donate plasma” as evidence of altruism rather than financial desperation, or interpreting “does bereavement include uncles” not as a question about work leave entitlement but as a reflection of socially acceptable grief. This is a fair and damaging criticism. The interpretive leap from raw search data to moral conclusion is one Rogers makes repeatedly, and it is not always earned.

On the question of how Google monetises all those questions, Rogers is conspicuously silent. For a book positioning itself as a frank account of what the search box reveals about us, this is a glaring omission. The data Rogers draws upon does not exist as a public good – it is the commercial foundation of one of the most profitable corporations in history. Readers are invited to marvel at human curiosity while the surveillance economy underpinning that curiosity goes entirely unexamined. The result is a fun if shallow tour of the modern world’s most burning questions – entertaining and often touching, but not quite the serious reckoning with digital life the
premise promises. What We Ask Google is an enjoyable and often moving book, best read as popular sociology rather than critical analysis. Rogers’s journalistic instincts are sharp, his anecdotes are wellchosen, and his underlying optimism about human nature is, if perhaps too selective, genuinely infectious. Where the book falls short is in its unwillingness to interrogate its own position: the view from inside Google is not a neutral one, and a more rigorous thinker would have reckoned with that directly. As it stands, this is a book that tells us a great deal about what we ask, and rather conveniently avoids asking the most uncomfortable questions of all.

By Lily Pagano, May 21, 2026.

Edited by Wannes Vanoyenbrugge.