A review by kim_possibly_reads
Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us about Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Did not finish book. Stopped at 13%.

This is the best example of what drives me up a wall in this industry. This is really awful amounts of data extrapolation for purposes the data was not meant for as it's not collected at a fine enough scale to come to these half baked conclusions. Google search data can be interesting if it's taken with a grain of salt, you can't know a person's motivations for googling something, I've googled plenty of things trying to get an answer for someone else. People also lie on the internet. I think this either needed to be more playful or more based in actual scientific methods because this as is is extremely misleading and not really talking about anything in the way it should have been. I wish it had just focused on the election data and not gotten distracted by trying to find all kinds of zany examples of other unexpected search stats as I think he had an interesting thesis there.