I study data at Google. Here are the 3 most revealing questions people ask when no one's looking—what it says about us is 'incredible'

We spend so much of our lives performing on social media, curating our greatest hits and professional milestones. But where do we go when we genuinely just want to understand the world — or admit that we have no idea what we are doing?

As a data editor at Google, I spend my days looking at the world’s largest publicly available dataset. To me, it’s the world’s brain, represented in data. It provides a unique window into what people have been thinking about for the past two decades.

The data is unfailingly honest. The way we search collectively is simply not the way we present ourselves on social media. There’s no such thing as a “dumb query,” and analyzing these massive trends gives us a highly accurate reflection of our shared curiosities.

When analyzing the trillions of queries made every year, incredible patterns emerge. Here are three of the most revealing questions people ask — and the surprising insights they reveal about who we really are.

If you look at the most-asked questions of all time, worldwide, you might expect complex metaphysical queries. While “What is love?” does make the top 10, the list is overwhelmingly dominated by the mundane.