Simon Rogers, Author, What We Ask Google: A Surprisingly Hopeful History of Humankind
What do billions of Google searches reveal about who we really are?
This week on “Ira’s Everything Bagel,” Ira sits down with Simon Rogers, author of What We Ask Google: A Surprisingly Hopeful History of Humankind, for a fascinating and unexpectedly uplifting conversation about the stories hidden inside the world’s largest dataset—our searches.
Simon shares how Google Trends became a powerful lens into human behavior, capturing everything from life’s smallest moments (“how to boil an egg”) to our deepest emotions around grief, parenting, and connection. What began as a personal exploration—sparked by the loss of his mother—evolved into a groundbreaking narrative that blends data, storytelling, and humanity.
Along the way, Simon discusses his unlikely journey from someone who once disliked math to becoming a pioneer in data journalism, how he learned to tell compelling stories through numbers, and why our collective search habits reveal far more commonality than division.
This episode explores:
How our everyday questions reflect shared human experiences
Why data can tell emotional, deeply personal stories
The emerging “science” of understanding humanity through search
How technology—and even AI—shapes the way we think and learn
Insightful, thought-provoking, and surprisingly hopeful, this conversation will change the way you think about every search you make.
ABOUT SIMON:
Simon Rogers is Google’s data editor, leading a team of data journalists, analysts, and visualizers to tell stories with Google’s data. Previously, he was Twitter’s first ever data editor, and he is also the author of Facts Are Sacred, based on The Guardian’s Datablog, which he helped launch. A lecturer in Data Journalism at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism in San Francisco, he has received the Royal Statistical Society’s award for statistical excellence in journalism. He lives with his family in San Francisco.