I really love Google Trends.

If I would have to explain why I love it, I would say its because Trends is a sort of a window into people’s minds.

Ever since Google started dominating the Web, their little „Search bar“ became everybody’s confidant, we tell Google things we are afraid to speak out loud even in front of our closest friends.

Take a simple example – you don’t see people going around just telling everyone how they are always bored, but for some reason, many tell that to Google.

If we look at the data from Google Trends, we will see that many people complain to Google that they are bored.

Using Google trends we can discover how humanity as a whole thinks.

For example, it is not surprising that more and more people are complaining to Google that they are bored during quarantine.

In this particular case, Google Trends acts as a tool that help us measure or quantify humanity’s boredom.

If you don’t believe that we tell Google things we cannot say to other people, just go to Trends and look for yourself.

For example, you can look up how search interest for „how to hide the body“ changes over time.

When we compare these two trends, we will see that, thankfully, much greater part of humanity is thinking about struggling with boredom, than how to hide the body – but that doesn’t change the fact that there are some people who occasionally ask Google about best ways to dispose of a corpse.

I would like to think that those are mostly fiction writers who are just looking for ideas and not real murderers – but one can never know for sure.

For example – on 7 October 2015, 21 days before the schoolboy Bailey Gwynne was stabbed to death at Cults Academy in Aberdeen, his 16-year-old killer made a simple seven word Google search. It read: “How to get rid of someone annoying.”

Because of cases like this, somewhere out there, someone is watching what we say to Google.

Evidence – all the way back in 2013 Michele Catalano reported that her family’s Google searching got them a visit from counterterrorism police.

„Officers showed up at our home on Long Island, New York, suspecting we were terrorists because we looked up info on pressure cookers and backpacks“, she said.

I hope I will not get in same trouble for „googling“ „how to hide the body“.

Point is that Google, this search Behemoth, knows a lot about us – just look at their latest report about where we are going in the time of pandemic – and Trends is a tool that Google so kindly gave to us that enables us to see a fraction of what are they seeing.