Think about the last thing you searched for in Google. And the thing before that. And the thing before that. Those searches would probably offer a pretty good picture of who you are and what you’re interested in. At least, that’s according to Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, author of the book Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are, who believes that the questions we ask online often reflect what we truly think.

• People might not want to admit that race plays a factor in their voting, but it does. Take Obama’s 2008 election: By taking a look at the country’s Google searches, Stephens-Davidowitz found that places with high amounts of racist queries correlated almost perfectly with places where Obama did worse than other Democratic candidates.
• Doesn’t having mutual friends mean a relationship is more likely to work out? Nope. The more mutual friends a couple has on Facebook, the less likely a relationship is to work out.
• People are really insecure about sex. And that’s reflected in their Google searches. Men make more searches about their penis than any other body part.

• Seth Stephens-Davidowitz takes an even more in-depth look at what our online searches tell us about our sexuality.
• People are fake on social media. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz tells us how fake.
• Seth Stephens-Davidowitz examines how Google searches can predict hate crimes.

Here’s a piece of our conversation that we couldn’t fit into the show, about what searches show us about who is gay, and whether they want to reveal that publicly.