Visualizing how we dream via Google search trends

Google reveals the top searches of 2023

Google Search remains the world's most popular online search engine, and the tech behemoth reveals the most common searches from at the end of every year. See global as well as more local trends in most common searches for people, films, and more.

Explore an interactive history of Google search trends

This interactive allows users to browse for the most searched topics on Google Search since 1999 and provides noteworthy statistics. Topics are sorted by categories, including athletes, movies, reality TV, dog breeds, and sauces.

Google Search trends reveal truths about society that traditional surveys miss

Studies of human behavior show that survey respondents may lie to present themselves more favorably. By studying anonymous search data, researchers have uncovered hidden racism, mental health struggles, and interest in taboo or stigmatized topics.

The evolution of dream science—from interpretation to advanced brain imaging

In the mid-1900s, dream scientists would tape study participants' eyes open, wait for them to fall asleep, and attempt to influence their dreams by shaking, tickling, and more. Now, advanced techniques like MRIs have shed new light on what’s happening in the brain as we sleep.

What do your dreams mean, according to science

Humans have been interpreting dreams as signs from deities, spirits, or the psyche for ages, and research shows that reflecting on and analyzing one's dreams can be beneficial. In alignment with dreams' elusive nature, they have no objective or clearly assigned meaning. However, variations of common dreams, such as a surprise exam in a forgotten class, are rife with shared primal fears.

Google Search includes over 50 Easter eggs hidden behind specific search terms

Some queries—besides providing search results—trigger additional effects on the site, including tilting the page after searching for "askew," having the page perform dance moves to the song after searching for "[cha-cha slide]," and the ability to play a version of block breaker after searching for "Atari breakout."

Researchers believe the brain consolidates memories, processes emotions, and plans for the future during dream states

Modern media exposure may impact whether people dream in color or black and white

A 1942 study found that 70.7% of college sophomores rarely saw colors in their dreams, while a similar survey in 2003 showed that only 20% reported the same. The prevalence of color television and films may make color dreams or the recollection of color features easier to remember.

Explore more than 7,000 of the world's languages

Google collects open-source data on languages, detailing how many known speakers each language has, whether its endangered, and where in the world it is spoken.

The earliest record of dream interpretation dates to Ancient Sumer

Ancient Babylonia was a hub for oracular studies. Dreams were seen as nightly dispatches from lower-world or chthonic deities, and practices including astrology, omen reading, and liver divination attained wide-reaching influence. Few surviving records of oneiromancy—interpreting dreams as revelations of future events—have been found.

We dream for around two hours each night, on average

Every night we lie down to rest, we spend about two hours traveling through seemingly real experiences as dreams bubble up from our subconscious during various phases of sleep. Despite the ubiquity of the experience, where dreams come from—and what their purpose is—remains largely unanswered.

Explore an interactive map built from more than 100,000 survey responses on where people find joy in their lives

Visualizing where happiness comes from

Researchers asked 10,000 participants to list 10 things that recently made them happy. One author broke down the responses into subject-verb-object categories, isolating the people and events that made responders satisfied. The result highlights how simple things like having dinner or watching a movie made someone happy. Dive in and look for some ideas or tips on feeling happy today with this fascinating visualization.

Twelve artworks you'll love zooming into

Zoom in on these famous paintings to see what's hiding up close, then go exploring the rest of Google's incredible Arts and Culture hub.

Explore and visualize AI-driven global flood forecasts in 'Flood Hub'

Google's tool provides water trends, real-time flood forecasts, local inundation maps, and flood alerts, using AI models and available data to help people and institutions take action up to 7 days before a flood.

Dreaming under the Nazi Regime

Days after Hitler seized power, a man told psychoanalyst Charlotte Beradt that he had dreamed of being forced to raise his arm in a Nazi salute ("It took me half an hour to get my arm up, inch by inch"). Beradt recorded this dream and many others so they "might one day serve as evidence." This is an English translation of her work, "The Third Reich of Dreams."

See 16 art pieces that were inspired by or evoke elements of top phobias

CBC News informally polled readers about their fears and then found works of art either inspired by or nodding to those topics.

Visualizing the symbols and history of world flags

More than 200 world flags feature high-intent designs, projecting ideals and values to the world through archetypal symbols, colors, and shapes. This page effectively depicts the data behind symbol and shape usage, how much each country's flag has changed over time, the most popular colors used, and more in a series of elegantly simple charts.

Explore the rise (and fall) of baby names over time

Baby names popularity and trends in the acclaimed interactive graph of baby name popularity. Watch as baby name trends rise and fall over time.

How people imagine a calendar year

It turns out everybody imagines the abstract calendar year in a simple, concrete way, though there are surprising differences between the exact model and shape of each image. Dive into one writer's collection of tens of thousands of questionnaire responses showing the fascinating consistency and divergence of how people visualize time.

Take a virtual journey through the world's deserts with Google Earth and BBC

Explore some of the world’s deserts in this “Natural Treasures” collaboration between Google Earth and BBC Earth. Visit the Namib Desert in Namibia where the simplest strategy to escape the heat is to emerge only in the cool of the night....

See these 16 pieces of art evoking phobias of snakes, flying, spiders, and more. 

An interactive look at your own life through demographics

This interactive site allows you to understand the journey of your life in numbers and dates. World Data Lab asks users to enter their date of birth, country of birth, and sex at birth. The site then provides an interactive page tailored to your...

Explore a gallery of DALL-E creations

OpenAI's text-to-image generator can create content in a wide range of image styles based on simple prompts. Its utility has also given rise to an organic, passionate user base who employ the tool both for fun and for professional purposes.

Visualize your city’s annual daylight map

Type in your town or region and see sunrise and sunset for each day of the year. A separate view shows the number of hours of day versus night for each day. Search a city far north like Oslo, Norway, and compare its graphs to one near the equator (like Singapore).

The unsolved mysteries of Machu Picchu

Who lived there? How did they get all that granite up there? Who were the 100 bodies found buried here, and why did some of them have elongated heads? Explore eight of Machu Picchu’s unanswered questions while scrolling through panoramic, clickable street-view images of the site, in this guide from Google Arts and Culture.

A 2,000-year history of alarm clocks

Clocks have revolutionized the way we live, structuring our days into abstract, regular units and providing quantification for those who are chronically late. The alarm clock was the next obvious step: clocks which not only tell you the time but...

The lifetime cost of the American dream exceeds $5M

A new analysis suggests it costs millions of dollars to maintain the American dream over a lifetime. The price tag includes retirement, healthcare, higher education, homeownership, and other core elements of a comfortable life for the average American.

The Dracula character, now seen as the vampire archetype, was inspired by a seafood-induced nightmare its creator experienced.

Browse a detailed visual analysis of over 200,000 similes—comparisons that often use 'like' or 'as'—from popular fiction to see how frequently writers the same idiomatic expressions.

20,000 letters to the advice columnist 'Dear Abby' provide insight into prevailing sex, religion, and LGBTQ fears, anxieties, and concerns from the 1950s onward.

Visualize the path of every solar eclipse from 1900 to 2099 and see what each looks like when observed from different locations on Earth.

A century of Billboard issues documenting the evolution of popular music.

Stanford built a Google Maps for the Roman Empire, revealing how much it cost to travel in the ancient world

Children are now three times more likely to say they want to be a YouTuber when they grow up than an astronaut, with some even attending 'YouTube camps' that teach kids how to create content for the platform.

Explore the animals that populate the depths of the ocean, from fish and coral in the first few hundred feet, all the way down to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

When you complete a CAPTCHA on a website to prove you are human, you may be unknowingly training algorithms for self-driving cars, whose systems require training data to help identify crosswalks, bicycles, and other outdoor objects.

Fireworks-related ER visits are on the rise—in 2024, they increased by 52% as compared to the prior year.

As of 2025, the most cited papers in science include a review of graphene, methods to improve image recognition, streamlining electron density calculations, and optimizing protein studies.

In 1945, Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí and legendary animator Walt Disney began collaborating on a short film that was not completed until 2003, years after both men had died.

The Brothers Grimm were lawyers before they were storytellers, and became interested in fairy tales as they began investigating how rules and customs had been passed down through cultures.

Search a massive database of over 4 decades of clues from the TV quiz show 'Jeopardy!'

Explore a list of the 100 best novels of all time, compiled by some of the world's best living writers, including Salman Rushdie, Stephen King, and Jennifer Egan.

In 2009, the nation was gripped by the story of a missing young boy who was believed to be floating over Colorado in a homemade balloon, until it was revealed that he was at home the whole time.

Roughly 43 million US borrowers owe roughly $1.7T in student debt, the second-largest source of consumer debt behind mortgages.

Learn how to read a prospectus, the juicy document that any company must file with the SEC before going public.

Take a 3D tour of the Hajj, Islam's annual pilgrimage to Mecca, undertaken by over 1.5 million Muslims.

The term 'algorithm' originated from the Latinized name of al-Khwārizmī, a 9th-century mathematician whose works introduced Arabic numerals and the decimal-based numeral system to Europe and whose treatise 'Al-Jabr' gave algebra its name.

The history of many kitchen appliances involves unexpected discoveries and applications, including wartime radar turned hamster defroster and replacing an 'ice king' with heat-stealing boxes.

Art theft is the third-largest source of criminal revenues worldwide, thanks in part to the subjective nature of valuing a work of art.