A s anyone who has procreated this century knows, childrearing involves daily rounds of online searching. The most common parenting-related queries feature in What We Ask Google, a valiant attempt by the search giant’s data editor Simon Rogers to create a “surprisingly hopeful picture of humankind” (that’s the subtitle) from searches performed over the past two decades. “Why do babies get hiccups?” we ask. “When do babies teethe?” “Why do toddlers bite?” “How do you know if your child has ADHD?” “How to tell kids about divorce?” Since 2006, engineers have used Google Trends to make sense of common (and anonymised) queries like these, going back as far as 2004, when phones were dumb and less than half of UK households had internet access. Rogers, a British former Guardian journalist based in California, views the results as a kind of social mirror. “If you care enough to search for something, that has to mean something, even if that care only lasts as long as it takes to say the query,” he argues.…