If you've wondered how on earth the USA became so polarized, so violent, racist and ignorant, you've got to read this book. Everybody Lies makes it clear that all this meanness and hatred was always there but people kept it a secret. We learn the truth about infidelity, violence, sexuality, etc. etc. Eye-opening and completely fascinating.

Great book with many fascinating insights based on real data and data science. The author explains his approach to data science very well. If you liked Freakonomics, you'll love this book.

Funny & thoughtful.

An entertaining and informative read. Stephens-Davidowitz clearly describes how Big Data combined with intuitive searches reveals surprising information.

Amazing book, Taught me about Data Science, using most googled words, the beginning and the next up and coming field of discipline

This book was OK, but not great. The basic premise is that people do not answer surveys honestly; they answer in a way that makes themselves look good. Also, traditional surveys have relatively small samples.

On the other hand, if you can analyze millions of Google searches, you can get loads more data, and people are apparently more honest in their Google searches than they are in surveys.

I have to say that my reaction to that was “Don’t Google anything you would not want on the front page of the Seattle Times (or your newspaper of choice)!” This author was looking at aggregate anonymous data, but clearly Google knows what you have Googled as an individual. Talk about scary!

There were some interesting tidbits. For example, the author notes (in hindsight, of course) that the big data of Google searches showed that the current president was likely to win in 2016, even if people were unwilling to admit they would vote for him when surveyed. Also, people claim they plan to vote, but they don’t Google things like “how to vote” and “where to vote”, which demonstrates they were just trying to look good to the person taking the survey.

Some areas of the country appear to have relatively few gay people, but Google searches from those parts of the country indicate otherwise.

People say on Facebook that they like the Atlantic more than the National Enquirer. Their Google searches and clicks indicate otherwise. Whatever your Facebook friends are saying on Facebook is probably untrue, as people are trying to make themselves look more impressive to others. (If you did not already know that, you are gullible.)

I was underwhelmed by this book. It might make an interesting magazine article, but it does not have enough substance for a book.

Just some guy's opinion wrapped up in a pseudoscientific evaluation of Google searches. You can't just observe something and then draw a bunch of conclusions about it. It might be mildly interesting for a conversation starter, but it is too low in actual usable information to be of help to anyone. I do agree with him in that everybody lies. I just don't agree that he has chosen the most interesting reason for why they do it.

(And he seems to have more than a fair share of Trump Derangement Syndrome)

The Google search box is the new confessional box for a digital age. A place where deepest fears and forbidden wishes find new, unfiltered expression. In this new confessional, we don’t seek salvation— we seek information. And the questions we ask it often reveal things about us that were previously hidden, or misunderstood.
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Subtitled, “Big data, new data, and what the internet can tell us about who we really are,” this book was written by a former Google data scientist who uses “confessional” search data on a vast scale to draw new insight into the human condition. It’s a fascinating and compelling work which kept me reading from cover to cover in one day.
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I could quibble with the author’s overconfidence in the power of internet search data to accurately depict people’s true selves, because I believe that our relationship with the digital world is fundamentally a charade, and will one day come to be seen as such. But for now, the newness and sheer volume of this new form of data is electrifying and groundbreaking, and has great potential to shed new light on the previously dark corners of the human psyche. I eagerly look forward to the author’s planned sequel in which he intends to dive deeper into the “small data” that lives between the topline trends.
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The ancient Romans had a saying about a mountain giving birth to a mouse. I thought of this as I listened to the audiobook of Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s “Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us about Who We Really Are.” Stephens-Davidowitz makes great claims for the valuable insights that can be gleamed from the enormous data contained in digital sources such as Google searches and social media postings. Alas, his own insights thus gleamed lean toward the underwhelming. To give just one example, he goes to great lengths to finally answer the vexing question of whether professional basketball players tend to come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. (Spoiler: they don’t.) His conclusions are meaningful, no doubt, but not comparable, say, to the germ theory of disease. Still, his book is always interesting in a “Freakonomics” sort of way, and well worth the reader’s time.

If it wasn't for the fact that this book is the February read for my job's book club, I probably would've never read it; but I am so glad that I did! I couldn't even pull something from it to quote in this review because I felt like there were whole paragraphs that I wanted to share.

Everybody Lies is both informative and fascinating. I feel like Seth Stephens-Davidowitz did a great job explaining the significance and revolutionary impact of data on our world. His thesis didn't surprise me; however, many of the findings that he shared in his book did. And based on everything Seth discussed in Everybody Lies, it's crystal clear that data science is real and it's impact on our lives is big.