Lessons from Google Trends about the American psyche
I used to work as an entertainment and culture editor, trawling Google Trends every day to learn what people want to read about. I got to see how misinformation grows, how media narratives are built and what people search for when they think no one’s looking. It taught me a lot about Americans’ mental health and their relationship with media.
This is definitely not what it was originally intended for, but I believe Google Trends can tell us a lot about a country’s mental state. And the data from the US shows a nation grappling with serious issues: increasingly obsessed with ethnic, religious and gender divides, seeking mental health diagnoses online, unsure which news to trust and sometimes painfully clueless about their fellow humans.
This lesson about the American psyche is brought to you (but not sponsored) by Google Trends.
The way Google’s search engine works is based on keywords – words, phrases or fragments of speech that users type into the search bar to find what they’re looking for. If you’re looking to buy something for Mother’s Day you might use a keyword like mothers day gift ideas or, if you’re trying to refine the results a bit, you can add an adjective – cute mothers day gift ideas – or the year – mothers day gift ideas 2023 – to get recommended the latest trends.
Or, if you’ve just read a disconcerting headline on X (FKA Twitter) that, say, Republicans are rooting for a “red Caesar”, and you don’t know what that means, you might type in the keyword red caesar meaning.
Keywords are your best bet for telling Google what you’re interested in. The more detailed the keyword, the narrower the results, and the likelier they are to be exactly what you’re looking for. Type in sylvester stallone and you’ll get a sea of articles, interviews and artist profiles. But if you type in why does sylvester stallone own an abandoned mansion because of that one viral TikTok, this narrows down to a handful of articles exploring one singularly narrow rabbit hole.
I found it really interesting to see which keywords showed up every day, and which ones were on the rise consistently over the last few years. When looking at the US, both over the last 5 years and the last 19 (which is the farthest back you can go with the data), some disturbing trends emerge.
Americans are increasingly obsessed with ethnicity
After plateauing towards the end of 2019, ethnicity-related Google searches have been rising steadily over the past three years. Every time a celebrity who didn’t look obviously white made headlines, Americans rushed to decipher their ethnicity. The highest ranking searches featured rapper Ice Spice, Euphoria actors Alexa Demie and Dominic Fike, and Vice-President Kamala Harris’ father.
Runners up feature a jagged but steady climb in searches about whether or not a specific celeb is Jewish, white or black (in that order).
White the popularity of the latter two is offset by high-volume search terms such as white lotus (the HBO show premiered to rave reviews in the summer of 2021) and black friday (2022 sales totalled $9.12 billion, the highest ever recorded), the keyword is jewish was directly related to 2 questions that plagued Americans during the same interval: is (Ukrainian president) Zelensky Jewish? And is (former White House Chief Medical Advisor) Dr. Fauci Jewish?
Searches about whether President Zelensky is Jewish (he is) saw a massive spike between 20 - 27 February 2022, a few days after Russia invaded Ukraine. The trend is closely mirrored by searches for who is zelensky and completely overshadowed by where is ukraine.
Not only did Americans have trouble placing Ukraine on the map, they were also unsure which news about it to trust. Depending on their preferred media outlet, they might have been exposed to wildly conflicting narratives and even antisemitic conspiracy theories involving President Zelensky.
The popularity of is fauci jewish queries can also be attributed to off-the-wall conspiracy theories. In April 2021, anti-vaxxer Naomi Wolf went on Fox News and criticised pandemic restrictions, implying that Dr. Fauci didn’t serve the cause of “public health for the American people.” Instead, Wolf said, he worked for Israel, falsely claiming the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease had received a “humanitarian gift” of one million dollars from Israel.
In reality, he was awarded the Dan David award for achievement in public health, a prestigious $1 million distinction that comes from the Dan David Foundation, affiliated with Tel Aviv University.
Shortly after this incident, Wolf’s X (Twitter) account was suspended for spreading Covid vaccine misinformation.
2. And with whether or not someone is trans
Another trend I’ve been noticing is a depressing rise in searches on which famous person is trans.
Considering how openly hostile the political discourse is against trans and gender non-conforming people, this should come as little surprise. After all, how are you supposed to figure out who to blame for all your problems if you don’t know WHAT THEIR JUNK LOOKS LIKE?
Runners up include curiosity about whether someone is a woman or is a man and queries about right-wing pundit Matt Walsh’s noxious musings titled What Is A Woman.
These graphs speak to a wider anxiety that feeds off the American psyche like a parasite: a crippling fear of the “trans agenda”. Some version of this inaccurate and transphobic narrative has made its way into much of the media Americans consume, with dangerous real-life consequences.
So far in 2023 (it’s early October as I write this) 574 anti-trans bills were introduced in 49 states, many of them targeting access to gender-affirming healthcare. Of the total, 83 passed, 366 are active and 125 failed, according to Trans Legislation Tracker. This is a staggering increase from just last year, with 174 bills introduced for the whole year, of which only 26 passed.
In many states the lived experience of trans and gender non-conforming people is so dire, that a mass-migration looms. This (among other factors) is giving rise to a phenomenon the world may be unprepared for: an American diaspora.
3. Biology? Never heard of her
On the slightly lighter side there are the weird biology-related queries. I’m going to go ahead and assume it’s mostly kids and teens bulking up the volume of these searches.
There are also a disturbing amount of queries that obviously don’t get how pregnancy works – both in humans and in animals.
Or the connection between math and babies.
When you’re finished chuckling, these queries get downright depressing in the context of the US education system. With school districts reducing or entirely cutting out sex ed from their curricula, it’s no wonder students, in their confusion, are turning to Google for some version of “the talk”.
4. The lonely and the miscellaneous
Americans are a lonely bunch. It’s baked into one of the country’s most potent founding myths: the lonesome, masculine hero, who rides off into the sunset all by himself not by necessity but by choice.
Add to that the alienating layout of America’s suburbs, towns and cities, its toxic relationship with work, dwindling support networks and the wider divisions brought on by the pandemic, and you’ve got a nation suffering from extreme loneliness. Earlier this year the Surgeon General declared America’s chronic loneliness a health threat comparable with smoking.
In the absence of real-life practice people try to Google their way to better social skills.
Or at least some answers.
