Everybody Lies: The New York Times Bestseller

At Google, major decisions are based on only a tiny sampling of all their data. You don’t always need a ton of data to find important insights.

When and where they search for facts, quotes, jokes, places, persons, things, or help, it turns out, can tell us a lot more about what they really think, really desire, really fear, and really do than anyone might have guessed.

Some of this data will include information that would otherwise never be admitted to anybody.

am now convinced that Google searches are the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche.

In the pre-digital age, people hid their embarrassing thoughts from other people. In the digital age, they still hide them from other people, but not from the internet and in particular sites such as Google and PornHub, which protect their anonymity.

Specifically we looked at whether when a company advertises a movie in the Super Bowl, they see a big jump in ticket sales in the cities that had higher viewership for the game. They indeed do. People in cities of teams that qualify for the Super Bowl attend movies that were advertised during the Super Bowl at a significantly higher rate than do th

I tend not to trust Facebook status updates, for reasons that I will discuss in the next chapter—namely, our propensity to lie about our lives on social media.

Indeed, poor people living near rich people exercise more, smoke less, and are less likely to suffer from obesity.

The notion that ads improve sales is obviously crucial to our economy. But it is maddeningly hard to prove. In fact, this is a textbook example of exactly how difficult it is to distinguish between correlation and causation.

Levitt was telling us that a combination of curiosity, creativity, and data could dramatically improve our understanding of the world. There were stories hidden in data that were ready to be told and this has been proven right over and over again.