Somebody in Google could be the greatest psychologist ever. Or that somebody could be going plain crazy out there trying to piece together the puzzle of how the human brain thinks. There’s nobody else that knows more about people than internet search companies. People who are reticent in surveys and feedback forms and totally fake it on social media are surprisingly open when they search something on the web. Without thinking twice, they type out their health worries, sex concerns, career questions, ask all sorts of things about human body parts, and even want to find out how to commit a murder. Seriously. Apparently in 2014 there were about 6,000 searches for the phrase “How to kill your girlfriend”!

If all searched questions were pooled and analysed, just imagine what a data scientist can learn, and the inferences a sociologist, psychologist, economist or marketer can make? Google Trends, a tool released in 2009, actually does just that. It tells you how many times a word has been searched, and from which locations and at what times. It is a quick way to find out what is popular and what is not — analysing what we call Big Data.

Big Data can be really omniscient. Way back in 2012, we heard about how US retail store Target figured out that a teenager was pregnant, even before her parents knew about it, just based on her consumption data pattern (the clues were scent free soap, supplements, sanitisers and so on). That incident has been every marketer’s favourite case study, and there’s been a frenzy to decipher data so as to know the customer even better than the customer knows himself.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s book Everybody Lies: What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really are brings home the power of data even more sharply and disturbingly home. The former Googler and data scientist refers to search data as the digital truth serum. “The power in Google data is that people tell the giant search engine things they might not tell anyone else,” he says.

Lying all the way

The central theme of the book is that people lie on surveys, polls, but they are surprisingly unguarded and open on internet searches. You may say one thing in your social media posts but what you are really thinking will surely show up in search data. For instance, Stephens-Davidowitz sifts through social media posts to come up with the top ways women describe their husbands. On social media, women call them 1) the best 2) my best friend 3) amazing. By contrast, the top three descriptors on anonymous searches are 1) gay 2) jerk 3) amazing.

Stephens-Davidowitz throws up countless examples of what people are searching for what exposes their innermost thoughts and opens the curtains on the rampant racism and double standards present in society. “Google search data and other wellsprings of truth on the internet give us an unprecedented look into the darkest corners of the human psyche,” writes Stephens-Davidowitz .

The sections on racism and its correlation to the US elections are especially interesting. When Obama first won, one in hundred Google searches which included the president’s name also included the word nigger. It also accurately pinpointed the location of racism. While traditional surveys tended to pinpoint modern racism in the southern States of America, Google data showed highest racist searches in upstate New York and places like Pennsylvania and Mid-Western regions. Stephens-Davidowitz says had Hillary Clinton made use of the Google Search data information rather than relying on traditional polls and acted on that information, things could well have been different.

There are plenty of books on Big Data, but what distinguishes this tome is the easy conversational style and the very amusing examples he uses to illustrate his case. There’s so much trivia in the Search data that just listing some of the funny searches could be a wonderful book. For instance, stuff like when do people search for jokes. But the book goes beyond the lists and does some serious analyses.

Stephens-Davidowitz is not afraid of boldly testing out and challenging some of Sigmund Freud’s legendary theories. Are Freudian slips or bloopers that people make really about what they secretly desire? Davidowitz studies more than 40,000 typing errors collected by Microsoft researchers (‘sexurity’ instead of security and so on) and rubbishes this theory. However, when he sifts through search data on PornHub, he does find faint echoes of Freud’s Oedipus Complex.

A data gold mine

Although a large chunk of the book is devoted to sexuality (perhaps this has to do with the insane volume of Internet searches on this subject as well), there are plenty of other areas that the author gets into. Basketball, politics, education — literally every area is a data gold mine to zoom into people’s minds and uncover interesting patterns .

But what can the world do with all this data? If somebody is searching how to commit suicide can that suicide be prevented? As the author himself points out thought does not necessarily translate into intent, and cops cannot be turning up at every door basis a search. Also, what are the ethics involved in using this data? There are companies such as airline booking sites that look at search data and quickly up prices exploiting consumers. Is that permissible?

There’s lots you can do with Big Data, but there’s lots that you should not do with Big Data as well. Although Stephens Davidowitz is a huge evangelist for what data science can do, he does point out the dangers as well. The book is a highly enjoyable read, but it may just be overstating the case for Big Data.

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