Google's most popular questions
From 'What is twerking?' to 'Is my husband gay?', the questions we ask the search engine reveal our current obsessions - and our deepest, darkest concerns
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If you were to look at the search history on my computer, the list of all the websites I’ve visited and the questions I’ve asked Google, you’d learn a lot about me. You’d learn where I bank, that my last grocery order included smoked fish and Ryvita, that I spend too much time on Pinterestand gossip sites, that I’m mulling a trip to Dubrovnik, which film I saw last Saturday and at what cinema, that there are leatherjacket larvae in my garden, that I have a cat that licks plastic, and a whole load of other stuff that I’m not about to tell you – or anyone else, for that matter.
But I have told Google. Where once we saw the internet as the equivalent of an encyclopaedia, and search engines as librarians, now we treat them as our closest confidants. Google knows all our secrets. Take this apocryphal story about an internet service provider tracking the searches of a customer: over a matter of weeks, they went from “pregnancy vitamins” to “relationship counselling” to “abortion clinics” – a six-word tragedy that rivals Ernest Hemingway’s “For sale: baby shoes, never worn”.
Like many people, I trust Google to find me answers to everything from the mundane to the medical. Now, after a decade in which our increasing obsession with social media brought our computers out of the study and into the living-room, more of us are turning to the internet even when our question is emotional or irrational. The result: two decades after the birth of the web, our search histories have become a mirror to every aspect of our lives.
“Someone once said that what you look for is way more telling than information about yourself – this is something Google and other search engines understood a long time ago,” says Luciano Floridi, the Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the Oxford Internet Institute.
“Future generations will be able to trace our interests as a society just by looking at what we were looking for. Even if we don’t find the information, it doesn’t matter. Who we are, how we represent ourselves, how the world feeding back a mirror image of ourselves shapes our idea of ourselves – this is as old as philosophy, but today has a completely new twist. The online and offline are becoming more and more blurred, and that feeds back into our self-perception.” (If that sounds pseudy, then think of the example of a recruiter Googling someone who’s applied for a job: does the person on Twitter better represent who they really are, or the person on their best behaviour in the interview room?)
