What We Ask Google
A Surprisingly Hopeful History of Humankind
Penguin Publishing Group · Print & ebook · May 5, 2026
Ever wondered what goes through other people’s minds—their silly questions, their inner anxieties, hopes, and dreams?
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- Who it’s for
- Simon Rogers traces two decades of Google searches, from everyday questions to shared hopes and worries.
- Themes
- Human behavior through search data, Shared hopes and worries, Common ground across humanity
- Genres
- Search & SEO, Pop Culture Studies, Technology & Society
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Start with this bookAbout this book
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 dataset: 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.”
Continue reading
Reassuringly, people consistently want to know, “Where to donate blood?” after natural disasters. And despite superficial differences (such as the deeply divided world map of cat people vs. dog people), humanity has a lot more in common than we often acknowledge. After all, everywhere around the world, it’s two a.m. when parents want to know how to get their baby to sleep. Brimming with insights that vary from the playful to the profound, What We Ask Google delves into the momentous and the mundane secrets of what we ask when we get the chance to ask anything, offering a surprisingly hopeful picture of humankind.
Questions We Search
Simon Rogers traces two decades of Google searches, from everyday questions to shared hopes and worries.
Come here for
- Search patterns around helping bees and donating blood
- Questions parents ask about getting babies to sleep
Expect
- A look at playful and serious searches around the world
- Examples that show both differences and common ground
Where it sits
| Search & SEO | 44% |
|---|---|
| Technology & Society | 27% |
| Pop Culture Studies | 26% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- Search & SEO
- Social History
- Statistics for Social Science
- Authors
- Simon Rogers
- Publisher
- Penguin Publishing Group
- Published
- May 5, 2026
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Theme
- Human behavior through search data · Shared hopes and worries · Common ground across humanity
- Reading lane
- Search & SEO