90,000 PEOPLE GOOGLE 'HATE' EACH MONTH - BUT 2.7 MILLION GOOGLE 'LOVE'
Each month, more people Google ‘love’ than ‘hate’. Despite war and terrorism, the world is a beautiful place. By Ben Arogundade.
Above: EMOTIONS COLLIDE: Google's global monthly search figures reveal that 'love' and 'love quotes' are more popular than queries about hate.
So, what does this tell us? Not only that love trumps hate yet again, but that, every second of the day and night, people are actively enquiring and searching for information, guidance and inspiration about love matters, through the empowering words of others — usually the famous quotes of celebrities and philosophers. If one focuses on such stats from within the digital universe, and ignores the news headlines, the only conclusion can be that, overall, the world is wonderful place.
To look around at its many wars, conflicts and acts of terrorism, it may seem that the opposite is true, whereas in fact there is very little violence in the world today, per capita of population — and what there is, is magnified by biased news headlines that report death before life, sadness before happiness and bad news before good — offering us a false impression about life that leaves many feeling sad or afraid. No wonder then that some people have quit watching the news altogether.
Putting the news aside, there are experts that offer a wider picture, contending that life on Earth is steadily improving, year-on-year. Bill Gates has stated that we are closer than at any time in human existence to completely eradicating poverty, while psychologist and Harvard College Professor Steven Pinker, in his book, The Better Angels Of Our Nature: A History Of Violence And Humanity, argues that humans are becoming nicer and less violent with time, and that the current period we live in is actually the least violent ever.
BEAUTIFUL QUOTES ON LOVE IN APP
I decided to do my bit to promote and spread love by creating a new app, Love 100, which consists of a collection of original quotations on love. Instead of rehashing old celebrity love quotes, I have made up my own, offering a fresh take on this most elemental subject.
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Download The Love 100 App Free.
FOLLOWING THE RECENT TERRORIST atrocities in Paris, I was thinking about those elements within society who are filled with hatred for others, and who wish with all their being to do them harm. As I contemplated this, I wanted to find a way to gauge what might be called, ‘the state of hate’ — and its opposite — ‘the state of love’ across planet Earth today, now that we are 15 years into a new century. I decided to look at perhaps the most telling source within Western culture — Google’s search statistics.
GOOGLE: QUOTATIONS ON LOVE
Each month the tech giant records and publishes global figures for every major Internet search typed into its browser. The search engine records that the word “hate” is Googled approximately 90,500 times per month. This adds up to over a million hate queries per year. The number might sound like a lot, until one Google’s the number of searches for “love” — 2,740,000 — which amounts to almost 33 million annual searches. These statistics are compelling, as they allow us to measure how a substantial proportion of the world is reacting at any given moment, not just to current events, but also to any emotions they are feeling. Thankfully, within the online community at least, it would appear that more people are focused on loving than hating.
INSPIRING LOVE QUOTES
Google’s numbers get even more interesting if one searches the stats for combinations of emotional words Googled together as a phrase. For example, the term “love quotes” beats all the other estimates, with approximately 4,090,000 searches per month (or 49 million per year). This compares with only 27,000 searches for the phrase, “hate quotes”.
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