How we ask Google for help
May 19, 2021
Asking for help is one of the hardest things to do. But asking Google is easy.
Over the years, we’ve asked Google for help with a lot of things—about bees, for example, but also hoarding and floods—and the beauty of the resulting data is that it reveals what we are most private about asking. To reach out to a friend to get help with alcoholism or to offer support for someone struggling with grief is to be vulnerable. What you ask Google stays between you and Google.
In the midst of the pandemic, conversations about mental health have emerged in the media. But Google Trends data shows that we were always dealing with these issues—it’s just that no one was talking to each other about it.
This is what we've been searching for help with.
Each bubble represents one month's worth of searches for “how to help _____” or “how to help someone with _____.” Click on the buttons to filter out each category and see how each topic contributes to the full picture of searches.
The vast majority of searches are for mental health related terms, while a minority are for helping with sudden tragedies. Searches for locations are generally because something happened—a flood struck a city, or a fire wiped out a region.
But most of our private concerns—the ones we ask Google in secret—are about psychological challenges. Whether it's for ourselves or for loved ones, the bulk of our searches are about things like depression, addiction, and panic attacks.
Since 2015, social problems like homelessness and refugee crises have harnessed just as much search interest as Hurricane Harvey hitting Texas and the civil war in Syria.
But these events don't capture our attention for long.
The peaks of interest in far-off tragedies rise and fall again quickly. Meanwhile, interest in the everyday problems that strike us and our loved ones, from depression to anorexia, stays fairly high.
Interest in some of these has risen sharply in the last year—rape, anger management, and anxiety, to name a few. Others have seen a steady rise. Perhaps no topic has been of as much interest, though, as depression.
Depression is consistently one of our top concerns
A wave of media coverage has pushed mental health issues into the spotlight this year, but the folks at Google Trends know we've been privately searching for them all along. Depression takes the top spot consistently—only the coronavirus overtook depression in terms of search volume, and it only did so for a couple of months.
Until now, our cries for and offers of help have largely stayed between us and Google. But if the pandemic has taught us anything, it should be that we need to lean on each other—we've all been searching for the same things all along.