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Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has this idea: we all lie except when we’re on Google Search. “How Big is My Penis? (And Other Things We Ask Google)” on Freakonomics Radio with Stephen Dubner
When we are asked to answer to a question — it doesn’t matter if it’s personal or not — we tend to lie, that’s a fact. We act like that because we’re jealous of our intimacy or because we don’t want to answer or maybe because we want to please the interviewer.
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz came up with this idea: there’s a peculiar situation when we’re very sincere and that’s when we feel protected by anonymity. It’s when we’re using Google Search. Most of us know that Big G collects our data and knows exactly what we search but asking an embarassing question to a machine is way different than do the same thing to a human being.
Studying the most searched trends and keywords on Google allowed Seth to discover interesting and weird things too, like the fact that indian men would like to breastfeeding their own kids (apparently India is the only country when such a strange query runs).
He uses this analysis also to understand the feeling of the society, like for instance how often “Muslim hate” or “kill muslims” are searched after a terrorist attack. This might lead to interesting findings too: after the San Bernardino attack, which was later linked to an american muslim, Barack Obama gave a speech and praised all the most important public personas such as sport champions or artists that happened to be muslims too. And this led to a surge in this kind of queries on Google Search. That’s why two weeks later he took a different path, speaking of social categories instead of specific people (workers or doctors and so on).
Studying what we are looking for might be good to understand who we are and also who we should rather be.