Seth Stephens-Davidowitz and Jacinta Parsons at the Wheeler Centre

‘What is a fidget spinner?’, ‘how to make slime’, and ‘what is the Paris Climate Agreement?’ were among the top Google searches of 2017.

What was the last question you typed into Google, and what does it reveal about you? What does the data on all Google searches since the beginning of the internet tell us about our species?

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has a few ideas. He’s a former data scientist at Google and the author of Everybody Lies, a revealing and sometimes horrifying exploration of our accumulated internet search data. Diving deep into a truly awesome dataset (humans are estimated to amass eight trillion gigabytes of data in internet searches every day), Stephens-Davidowitz asks what our Google searches expose about human anxieties, biases and aspirations.  

In this event at the Wheeler Centre he presents his findings, then takes audience questions in conversation with Jacinta Parsons.

This event was presented in partnership with Integrity 20 / Griffith University.