THE WONDERING
ABOUT
The Wondering shows what the world is looking for, as it happens. Google handles more than five trillion searches a year, about 158,000 every second. In this field each point of light stands for roughly a thousand of them, released at that rate.
The points rise from where each language is spoken. They are brighter where it is daytime and dimmer where people are asleep, and a pale band follows the sunlit side of the Earth with the real clock. About fifteen percent of the searches made each day have never been made before; these appear as white sparks.
The words that drift through the field are the Wikipedia articles people read most in eighteen languages on the latest full day. An article whose readership jumped against the day before gathers into a brighter knot.
Where The Second Atmosphere follows what the world is reporting, The Wondering follows what it is wondering about.
Pageview data from the Wikimedia REST API. Search volume from Google's published annual total.