Search data from Google Trends is used to compile common, anonymised questions people ask online, including parenting topics such as hiccups, teething, biting, and ADHD, as well as guidance on divorce. Queries are tracked over roughly two decades, reaching back to 2004 when internet access was limited. The results are presented as a social mirror, based on the idea that searching indicates care, even if it is brief. The collection ranges from trivial how-to questions to occasionally poignant signals. Some trends are unexplained, while contextual information is added where possible, such as shifts in interest that reflect demographic pressures on adults caring for both children and parents.
"Since 2006, engineers have used Google Trends to make sense of common (and anonymised) queries like these, going back as far as 2004, when phones were dumb and less than half of UK households had internet access. Rogers, a British former Guardian journalist based in California, views the results as a kind of social mirror. 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, he argues."
"His collation, which he organises in themed chapters that are also peppered with biography, as well as lists and graphs, ranges from the purely trivial (How to fold a burrito has always been more searched than How to fold trousers except briefly in 2019 when a Marie Kondo show was big on Netflix) to the occasionally poignant. Many search trends are inexplicable. Why, for example, are Austrians, Nigerians and Canadians most likely to ask about back pain at night?"
"Where he can, Rogers brings context to the quirks. So beyond predictable queries in the parenting chapter, for example, we learn that, in early 2023, search interest in take care of parents overtook take care of kids evidence of the demographic squeeze on the sandwich generat"
Read at www.theguardian.com
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