Extracted from: Everybody Lies: What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz @ The Observer @ TheGuardian.com, July 9  (also with Q & A with author @ end)

[....] 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 [....]

The Truth About Sex

How many American men are gay? [....]

The Truth About Hate and Prejudice

Sex and romance are hardly the only topics cloaked in shame and, therefore, not the only topics about which people keep secrets [...]

The Truth About Girls

The discrimination black people regularly experience in the United States appears to be fuelled more widely by explicit, if hidden, hostility. But, for other groups, subconscious prejudice may have a more fundamental impact. For example, I was able to use Google searches to find evidence of implicit prejudice against another segment of the population: young girls. And who, might you ask, would be harbouring bias against girls? Their parents [....]

Can We Handle the Truth?

[....] Digital truth serum, on average, will show us that the world is worse than we have thought. But there are at least three ways this knowledge can improve our lives [....]