*This researcher seems genuinely upset by what he's discovered about people's Google searches. I don't find these results all that surprising, and in same ways they're even touching; people are afflicted with troubles, but they're making an effort to find solutions or consolations, they're trying to get by.
Google reveals deepest darkest secrets of people who google a lot
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The power in Google data is that people tell the giant search engine things they might not tell anyone else. Google was invented so that people could learn about the world, not so researchers could learn about people, but it turns out the trails we leave as we seek knowledge on the internet are tremendously revealing.
I have spent the past four years analysing anonymous Google data. The revelations have kept coming. Mental illness, human sexuality, abortion, religion, health. Not exactly small topics, and this dataset, which didn’t exist a couple of decades ago, offered surprising new perspectives on all of them. I am now convinced that Google searches are the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche....
