Life Lessons From Google Search With Simon Rogers - TWMJ #1047

**Mitch Joel** (0:00)
Well, hey there and welcome to episode number 1047 of Thinking With Mitch Joel. It's Sunday, August the 2nd, 2026 This is the show that used to be called Six Pixels of Separation. Let's get on with the conversation.
What do our Google searches reveal about who we really are? Not the version of ourselves we present on social media or the polished identity we offer to the world, but the private questions, our fears, our curiosities, our anxieties, our hopes.
Everyday problems that we type into a search box when no one else is watching. Simon Rogers has spent years exploring this exact question. He's the data editor at Google, a former Guardian journalist and the author of What We Ask Google, A Surprisingly Hopeful History Of Humankind. He's drawing on two decades of Google Trends data. Simon offers a remarkable portrait of our collective consciousness, one that is far more human, vulnerable, and optimistic than many of us might expect. In this conversation, we explore what the world's largest accessible dataset reveals about stuff like grief and loneliness and friendship and parenting, and misinformation and culture, and even our desire to help one another. We also talk about why we may have more in common than we realize, how search has evolved from simple information retrieval into something closer to a stream of consciousness, and what changes when AI begins reshaping not only how we search, but how we ask questions in the first place. This is a conversation about data, but much more than that, it's a conversation about us. Enjoy the conversation.
So who are you and what do you do?

**Simon Rogers** (1:49)
My name is Simon Rogers. I am Data Editor at Google and I'm also author of What We Ask Google.

**Mitch Joel** (1:55)
That's great to connect Simon. Thanks for doing this.

**Simon Rogers** (1:57)
Thanks for having me Mitch.

**Mitch Joel** (1:58)
So this is a topic that I love. I've been part of the journalism world, part of the data world, part of even the, actually I was working at a search engine before Google existed. So that's how long I've been in that search racket for sure. So super interesting to have this conversation. I guess we should just start off with a general perspective. I don't know how many people understand what a data editor is by nature.
And it is somewhat of a new-ish role. Why don't you kind of walk us through what the journey is and what that means day in and day out for you?

**Simon Rogers** (2:30)
Yeah. I mean, so I moved to Google from the newsroom. I used to work for The Guardian. And back when I was there, we did a lot of data storytelling, which really means using data to add to the story, the big stories that are going on in the world. And that could be data visualization, it could be articles and so on. And then when I moved, I wanted a job title that I understood. So I went with the data editor. But essentially, what it means now is that I work with Google Trends data, which is the world's biggest accessible data set. You can go to trends.google.com and just download data yourself.
And basically, whenever there's anything public that Google does with that data, that is my team's work. So it could be things like Year in Search, or it could be that we work with a newsroom where they want to use data to see how people are searching for a specific story, that sort of thing.

**Mitch Joel** (3:17)
So let's anchor a little bit of where we're at. Your book is quite optimistic, which is great, but we live in a world that's changed so dramatically. I'd be curious to know if you feel that, one, in the general zeitgeist of the world, I'd also be curious about how much of a change you think there's been, I don't know, in five years or 10 years, that might help us understand this. I ask this because I'm a huge fan of Steven Pinker, and he wrote this book, The Better of Our Angels.
We think things are getting much, much worse, but actually trending wise, much better in terms of how long we're living, how many people are dying, things like that. Do you see those types of things at the macro level too?

**Simon Rogers** (3:57)
Yeah, I didn't go into it thinking, I'm going to write an optimistic book. I wasn't my intention. I just started doing it and it came through the data. For me, I'd had the thought this might be an interesting thing to explore really, so the book is about our everyday searches, it's about the way we search for health, or family, or pets, or food, or whatever it is.