We are constantly told that the internet has made us more isolated, polarized and selfish. But as a data editor at Google, my job is to glean insights from the mountain of search data, and I can tell you that the database of our actual intentions proves the exact opposite.
It is arguably the biggest publicly available dataset in existence and can reasonably claim to represent humanity across the world. When disasters strike, human beings reliably follow a strict cognitive path — first, we seek to understand the threat, and second, we take action to help others.
Our baseline setting in a crisis is compassion. To see this in action, we can simply look at how people search in response to a major natural disaster.
During the initial stages of an event, there is a rapid evolution in search queries. As a threat approaches, we first see a rise in informational queries — people seeking to understand what is happening and the scale of the danger.
But as the seriousness of the situation dawns, something shifts. We search for “how” — shifting from passively gathering information to actively responding. We saw this during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, where people battening down the hatches and stockpiling emergency supplies paused to search for something personal, understandable and very human: “How to calm a dog in a storm.” At its core, this is very simple: first, information; second, action. Once we’re engaged, we assume we can do something about it and we want to know how. It’s how search Trends move from “what is a hurricane?” to “how to calm a dog in a storm.”
We can track exactly how this looks geographically, comparing those inside a disaster zone to those outside the epicenter. For those in the path of destruction, searches are understandably about survival and protecting the vulnerable. In September 2024, when Hurricane Helene made landfall, the affected states all saw spikes in searches related to keeping pets safe — “pet friendly hurricane shelters near me” in Florida and “how to calm a puppy down” in Georgia, for example.
But outside the epicenter, the response is overwhelmingly about finding ways to assist. Disastrous things happen and we want to do something to help, even when the events are man-made. On the day of Orlando’s Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016, blood donations spiked +1,550% across the US. This was not just because people were lined up to give blood to the victims, but also reflected a desperate desire from the wider public to contribute however they could.
This desire to step in is a recurring feature of our collective brain. Searches for “How to help . . .” have never been higher than they are right now in the world of the mid-2020s. What is striking about the data is that often the searches are not about helping ourselves, or even our friends, but helping others.
When there’s a natural disaster, we search for how to help or donate to a cause. In the days after the devastating 2023 wildfire on the Hawaiian island of Maui, the top-trending search on donations across all of Google was “Maui fire donation.” We see this pattern repeat itself every time there is a huge global event — from the top-trending donation search for the Noto earthquake in Japan in 2024, to the massive surge in searches to “Donate to Ukraine” in 2022.
This desire to help is known as mutual aid, and I think it reflects a long-standing practice of supporting each other. The data tells me we want to help because we can identify with someone who’s going through something. We search for details about a crisis because we can see ourselves suffering in the same way. That is empathy. We even see this in our everyday searches for loved ones: in both the US and the UK, the top-searched query in this category for the last decade has been “How to help someone with depression,” followed closely by anxiety and panic attacks.
The things we care about day to day are changing constantly. Minute by minute, second by second, our attention is both utterly ephemeral and utterly focused at exactly the same time. But when it matters, that is when we search to help.
We may appear to be more polarized than ever before, yet this theme of trying to help others comes through again and again in the data.
Terrible things happen in the world every day. But when they do, our response is often the simplest one: to want to help, fix things and improve the world around us. The data strongly contradicts the idea that human beings are only interested in looking after themselves.
Rogers is the author of What We Ask Google: A Surprisingly Hopeful History of Humankind (Plume, out now.)
