Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz review – what internet searches reveal
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz wanted to call his new book How Big Is My Penis?, but his publishers demurred. He settled for Everybody Lies. The book is subtitled What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are and it's a polished display of some of the early fruits of "big data" science. Its principal defect, perhaps, is that it doesn't say enough about how many of these fruits are rotten.
Stephens-Davidowitz's first source, when he set up as a data scientist, was Google Trends, which records the relative frequency of particular searches in different places at different times. He soon added Google Adwords, which registers the actual number of searches. Then he moved on to other vastnesses: Wikipedia, Facebook and then PornHub, one of the largest pornographic sites in the world. PornHub gave him its complete data set, duly anonymised: every single search and video view. He also "scraped" many other sites, including neo-Nazi sites such as Stormfront, which account for the internet's resemblance to the box jellyfish, a highly poisonous predator with 60 anuses.
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